#mountain coati

[critter-creature-or-beast]

This is a...

critter

creature

beast

Voting ended onAug 6

By pierrebonmariage, CC-BY-NC

[arthistoryanimalia]

It’s #WorldCoatiDay!

On top is the earliest known European image of this endemic American animal, from the Felix Platter (1536-1614) collection of drawings, originally owned by Conrad Gessner (1516-1565); it’s a color illustration of a coati sent by Antonio Musa Brassavola (1500-1555), who was a physician to popes and kings, and probably depicted an animal from one of his clients’ menageries (note collar!).

Below is the woodcut Illustration Gessner made from this model, which became the first published image of a coati when he added the animal to his Historiae animalium encyclopedia in the 1554 appendix. Although he called it “Mus Indicus,” we know from the original illustration it was in fact a South American Coati (Nasua nasua).

Unlike Gessner’s South American Coati, Ulisse Aldrovandi’s (1522-1605) woodcut illustration published in De quadrupedibus digitatis viviparis (1637) was modeled from an original illustration by Guiseppe Arcimboldo (1526-1593) of a much rarer Mountain Coati (Nasuella spp., probably the Western Mountain Coati, N. olivacea) in a Habsburg court menagerie (c. last quarter 1500s).

[the-faunal-frontier]

Nasuella olivacea - Western Mountain Coati

[the-faunal-frontier]

Nasuella meridensis - Eastern Mountain Coati

[animal-families-tournaments]

Procyonidae family, round 1: Mountain Coati vs Olinguito

Mountain Coati

Olinguito

Voting ended onMay 20, 2025

[bottleofink]

look at the cute mountain coati

they're ~mysterious~ and haven't been studied very much

(it's a video because pictures of [real] mountain coatis are rare)

[heaveninawildflower]

Red Hartebeest (Alcelaphus caama) and Mountain Coati (Nasuella olivacea) watercolour

second half of 16th century by Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522–1605).

Web Gallery of Art

Wikimedia.