Western hazel dormouse is 100th Swiss wild mammal species
A new lineage has just been genetically identified, making it the 100th species of wild mammal in Switzerland.
Researchers at the Natural History Museum of Geneva and the Natural History Museum of St. Gallen made this discovery by cataloguing the genetic variability of all the small mammals in Switzerland.
They found that hazel dormice from eastern Switzerland and western Switzerland (sampled in Geneva and the canton of Vaud) differed genetically ten times more than the usual average for a wild species.
Although morphologically very similar, the new study shows that there are two independent species of hazel dormice in Europe and also in Switzerland: the western hazel dormouse (Muscardinus speciosus) and the eastern hazel dormouse (Muscardinus avellanarius), whose ranges hardly overlap.
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The new species is something of a rediscovery, since naturalists in the last century had already suspected its existence but were unable to confirm it with the resources of the time, which DNA has now made possible. It will keep the scientific name Muscardinus speciosus, which was given to it in 1855 by the German naturalist Anton Dehne, Geneva’s Natural History Museum said on Thursday. This work is published in the Italian Journal of Mammalogy.
Hazel dormice are discreet animals that frequent the edges of dense forests, where brambles and hazel trees provide shelter and cover. They raise their young in a nest carefully woven from dry grasses.
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