Xenarthra

In recent days I have resumed playing the alphabet game with mammals. That is to say one has to run through the alphabet, silently articulating a mammal for each letter. To run through at a steady pace, without mistakes or pauses. Which takes practise, with mistakes like fishes and pauses creeping in far too often.

So yesterday I established that a quagga was a sort of zebra, and that dealt with Q, until I discovered that it was extinct, a matter not hitherto taken by the rules committee.

That apart, that just left X, and Bing turned up the helpful site at reference 1. The best candidate was Xenarthra, the name of the super-order which contains sloths, anteaters, armadillos and such like animals. Allowed as known to Wikipedia, if not known to my usual reference 3, where most of these animals are put in the order of the Edentata. But we can allow that things have moved on a bit since 1960. With the relevant rule being that while names of groupings larger than a species are allowed in the game, once you have used the name of a group, you cannot then use the name of a member, and vice-versa. So if your A had been Anteater, your X could not be Xenarthra.

We then had the Xerus, a genus of ground squirrels from Africa. And while this may be a scientific name rather than a regular name, among cognoscenti there is much slippage between the two, with, for example, botanical ladies often talking about their cucurbits. I think the rules committee would approve.

And lastly we had the Xoloitzcuintle, or Xolo for short, the name of a variety of Mexican dog, once used for ceremonial, sacrificial and culinary purposes by the Aztecs. But this one is disqualified because it is the name of a variety of dog and does not qualify as a species in its own right, which last is required by the rules. It has to be a species or a larger grouping, not a smaller grouping.

Here endeth the lesson.

PS: the main users of reference 1 appear to be teachers in infant schools who are building alphabet charts using animals. They probably use them too much for this game to be much help to them in getting to sleep.

Reference 1: https://www.activewild.com/animals-that-start-with-x/.

Reference 2: http://michaelnoonanphotography.com/. The source of the image above.

Reference 3: Systematic dictionary of the mammals of the world - Maurice Burton - 1962.

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xoloitzcuintle.