The family Eupleridae contains just eight living species, thought to have evolved from a single ancestor which colonised Madagascar from the African mainland 18 – 24 million years ago. Madagascar’s largest carnivore, the fossa is unusual-looking, rather like a cross between a dog and a cat.

Animal

CarnivoresTherapsid

Cryptoprocta

A relative of the mongoose, the fossa is unique to the forests of Madagascar, an African island in the Indian Ocean. Growing up to 6 feet long from nose to tail tip, and weighing up to 26 pounds, the fossa is a slender-bodied catlike creature with little resemblance to its mongoose cousins.

Viverrids are cat-like in many of their features and expressions. They have pointed faces, a wide variety of markings on their coats and long bushy tails. They are thought to have evolved more slowly than any other Carnivorans and to show the most primitive skeletal features of the Order Carnivora.

Commonly called civet cats, civets are not cats. In fact, they are more closely related to mongooses than they are to cats. In Singapore, the Common Palm Civet is one of the species of civet that can be seen. Civets are commonly known as ‘Musang’ in the Malay Language.

It was later when I consulted experts, that I learnt that civets don’t attack humans. Also, there have been no reports of anybody being bitten by a civet in Kolkata. The urban variety is the common palm civet or Paradoxurus hermaphroditus.

In its natural habitat, the civet cat secretes this glandular pheromone to mark its territories with a strong urinous, musky odour that naturally hangs in the air for days. The warmth of the aroma paired well with natural human scent during a time when bathing was an infrequent phenomenon.

Kopi Luwak: $600 per pound A prized Indonesian means of crafting luxury coffee, Kopi Luwak references the process that elevates the beans to such expensive territory. The coffee cherries ferment as they pass through the civet, a cat indigenous to tropical forests.