Endangered
Long-tailed chinchilla
Chinchilla lanigera
Long-tailed chinchilla is a rodent in the family Chinchillidae (order Rodentia) — Chinchilla lanigera, recorded as Endangered and tied to Chile.
Appearance
Chinchilla's hair color was originally mottled yellow-gray in the wild. Through selective breeding, their dominant colors include beige, white, and ebony, and the recessive colors include sapphire, violet, charcoal, and velvet. The general color of their upper parts is bluish or silvery gray. The underparts are yellowish-white.
Males typically weigh 369–493 g (13.0–17.4 oz) with a mean of 412 g (14.5 oz), while females weigh 379–450 g (13.4–15.9 oz) with a mean of 422 g (14.9 oz). Domesticated animals are larger than wild ones and more sexually dimorphic, with the female weighing up to 800 g (28 oz) and males up to 600 g (21 oz).
Range and habitat
The climate in the wild chinchillas' native habitat is rather harsh, with daytime summer temperatures climbing up to 30 °C (86 °F) in the shade and dropping to 7 °C (45 °F) at night (even below the freezing point in winter). Historically, Chilean chinchillas were reported from Talca (35°30'S), Chile, north to Peru, and also eastward, from Chilean coastal hills, throughout low mountains. No fossils of the Chilean chinchilla are known to have been found, and by the mid-19th century, Chilean chinchillas were not found south of the Choapa River in central Chile.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Diet and breeding
As herbivores, they are gregarious and prefer living in groups. A well-balanced chinchilla diet consists of high-quality grass hay, chinchilla pellets and limited amounts of vegetables and fruits.
The feed intakes of adult chinchillas are about 5-6% of their weights. Domestic breeds of chinchilla are believed to descend from specimens of C. Lanigera.
In crisis
Both species are endangered in the wild after historically being hunted for their soft hair coats. Wild populations of Chilean chinchillas, as of 1996, occurred in Aucó (31°38'S, 71°06'W), near Illapel, IV Región, Chile, in Reserva Nacional Las Chinchillas and in La Higuera, Chile, about 100 km (62 mi) north of Coquimbo (29°33'S, 71°04'W). The Chilean chinchilla is endangered, with the second-highest conservation priority among Chilean mammals.
CITES lists this taxon on Appendix I. Confirm the current appendix on the CITES checklist.
Long-tailed chinchilla is Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Long-tailed chinchilla, Wikidata item Q834053. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
