Raccoons’ family are New World “little bears” with weak carnassials
Procyonidae—raccoons, coatis, kinkajous, olingos, olinguitos, ringtails, cacomistles—are New World carnivorans, generally omnivorous across many habitats. German Kleinbären (“small bears”) and Waschbär (“wash bear”) show how people read them as miniature ursids with laundry habits.
Procyonidae is a New World family of carnivorans comprising raccoons, ringtails, cacomistles, coatis, kinkajous, olingos and olinguitos. Most are fairly small, slender and long-tailed, though the common raccoon is stocky. They occupy many kinds of habitat and generally eat a mixed diet, which has blunted their meat-eating equipment: they still have carnassial teeth, but these are poorly developed, especially in raccoons. Most have 40 teeth, while the kinkajou has one fewer premolar per row, for 36.
Their build led Europeans to see them as miniature bears. German calls the family Kleinbaren, small bears, the raccoon a Waschbar, or washing bear, for its habit of dunking food, the coati a nose-bear and the kinkajou a honey-bear; Dutch follows the same pattern. Researchers now think procyonids are closer to the weasel family than to bears. Shared traits include a short snout and a relatively flat jaw socket, and the tree-dwelling kinkajou adds a prehensile tail and distinctive thigh bones.
Most species live alone. Female coatis are the exception, foraging in bands of 4 to 24, and kinkajous have been found in groups of two males and one female. Ringtails, olingos and kinkajous usually bear a single young, whereas raccoons and coatis have litters of 2 to 6.
Fossils from the Miocene about 20 million years ago were once assigned to Bassariscus, the ringtail genus, and early procyonids may have branched off the dog lineage as they shifted to omnivory. Their diversity centres on Central America. They reached South America in the Great American Interchange, beginning about 7.3 million years ago with Cyonasua, and some, such as Stromeriella, lived in the Old World before dying out in the Pliocene. Kinkajous split from the rest about 22.6 million years ago. The red panda once sat in this family but now has its own, Ailuridae, and DNA showed that the olingos are not all subspecies of one species.
Source: Procyonidae
