List of mammals of Canada
International Associated acts This is a list of the mammal species recorded in Canada.
[1] Its large territorial size consist of fifteen terrestrial and five marine ecozones, ranging from oceanic coasts, to mountains to plains to urban housing, mean that Canada can harbour a great variety of species, including nearly half of the known cetaceans.
[3] The most well represented order is that of the rodents, and the smallest that of the Didelphimorphia (common opossums).
Studies of mammals in Canada hearken back to the 1795 northern explorations of Samuel Hearne, whose account is considered surprisingly accurate.
The first seminal work on Canadian mammals, however, was John Richardson's 1829 Fauna Boreali-Americana.
Joseph Burr Tyrrell was the first to attempt to produce, in 1888, a comprehensive list of Canadian mammalian species.
Ernest Thompson Seton and Charles-Eusèbe Dionne's work were also important.
Conservation status - IUCN Red List of Threatened Species: Bats most distinguishing feature is that their forelimbs are developed as wings, making them the only mammals capable of flight.
(French name) (authority) (Chauve-souris blonde) (Oreillard de Townsend)
(Pipistrelle de l'Est) Carnivorans include over 260 species, the majority of which eat meat as their primary dietary item.
(Phoque annelé) Cetaceans includes whales, dolphins and porpoises.
They are the mammals most fully adapted to aquatic life with a spindle-shaped nearly hairless body, protected by a thick layer of blubber, and forelimbs and tail modified to provide propulsion underwater.
There are about 220 artiodactyl species worldwide, including many that are of great economic importance.
dalli Didelphimorphia is the order of common opossums of the Western Hemisphere.
Opossums probably diverged from the basic South American marsupials in the late Cretaceous or early Paleocene.
They are small to medium-sized marsupials, about the size of a large house cat, with a long snout and prehensile tail.
(Opossum d'Amérique or de Virginie) The lagomorphs comprise two families, Leporidae (hares and rabbits), and Ochotonidae (pikas).
They can resemble rodents, but differ in a number of physical characteristics, such as having four incisors in the upper jaw rather than two.
(Lapin de Nouvelle-Angleterre) (Bangs, 1895) Rodents make up the largest order of mammals, with over 40% of mammalian species.
They have two incisors in the upper and lower jaw which grow continually and must be kept short by gnawing.
(Rat musqué) (Campagnol des bruyères) (Phénacomys d'Ungava) (Campagnol-lemming boréal)
Shrews and solenodons closely resemble mice, hedgehogs carry spines, while moles are stout-bodied burrowers.
(Taupe de Townsend) (Taupe à queue glabre) A number of wild mammals may be found in Canadian territory without being confirmed natives.
Finally, other species are encountered only accidentally, or so rarely in Canadian territory that it is impossible to tell whether they are permanent residents.
Most of these species are cetaceans, some generally poorly known: Risso's dolphin (Grampus griseus), the dwarf and pygmy sperm whales (Kogia sima and K. breviceps), Blainville's and True's beaked whale (Mesoplodon densirostris and M. mirus), the false killer whale (Pseudorca crassidens), and the striped dolphin (Stenella coeruleoalba).
The big free-tailed and evening bats (respectively Nyctinomops macrotis and Nycticeius humeralis), as well as the New England cottontail (Sylvilagus transitionalis) are found mostly in areas south of the U.S.-Canada frontier, and occasionally in Canada.
The sea mink (Neogale macrodon) formerly lived in the Maritime Provinces, but became extinct following overhunting and habitat destruction.
The eastern elk (Cervus canadensis canadensis), a subspecies of the elk or wapiti, was also formerly found in Quebec and Ontario, but was made extinct for much the same reasons as the sea mink.
Between the 1950s and 1981, it was suspected to be entirely extinct until a wild population was discovered in 1981 in Wyoming.
The swift fox (Vulpes velox) and sea otter (Enhydra lutris) both were extirpated in Canada in the 1930s, but were successfully reintroduced in the beginning of the 1970s.
