#mustalidae

From the four i organised so far, the phylogenetic wild cat tournament was the one I enjoyed most. I want to repeat it, and I choose my other favourite family of animals as the subject: Mustelidae.

(I'm calling this tournament "weasel", although I don't think you can call all of the animals here weasel the same way you'd call all the members of Felidae cat.)

How will this work?

The bracket is based on the phylogenetic tree in wikipedia, but a few species are missing from there, so I had to make some research and complete it. (I'm so cool for this)

There are 66 species included in the bracket. I colorcoded the subfamilies.

Because of using the uneven tree (instead of a standard bracket) different species have different number of opponents, and start with different chances to be the ultimate champion: for example the last match will be american badger vs the winner of everything else. It's not fair, but who cares, I do this to learn about animals and look at pictures.

The Wolverine

The wolverine, also referred to as a skunk bear is the largest land-dwelling mustalid. It's a stocky and muscular carnivore that has a reputation for being particularly ferocious and strong, out of proportion for his size.

The American Badger

The American Badger is a large burrowing mammal of the family Mustelidae. A carnivore it specializes in hunting Prairie Dogs and Ground Squirrels, however they also eat small mammals, lizards, snakes, insects and carrion. It is more carnivorous than its  distant relative the Eurasian Badger.

Its ears are short and rounded so they are no hinderance underground, it's hearing is not outstanding.

Weighing between 4 to 12 kilograms it reaches lengths of 72 cm in males and 64 in females with an additional 10 to 15 of tail. They reach sexual Maturity at 5 to 12 months of age and have around one to five kits per litter.