Still waiting for a bit more and reading when i get a bit of spare time, but I found out when genus Mustela first appeared in very recent refs (last year). It's actually quite recent geologically. In fact the earliest members of Mustela are used as one of the designating fossil groupings to know if a person is prospecting in the Miocene- Pliocene border, about 5.9 to 4.7 MYBP (Million Years before Present). It's NOT the only one of the mustelid genera used to mark those same years. Also used are the earliest Lutra fossils (otter branch), and fossils of two extinct ones: Trogonictis and Sminthosinis. I looked to see if I could find on-line images of those two for you but could not. The radiation the Mustela genus had was rapid with a lot of diversity, just as the earlier radiation of mustelids was rapid, but then again it happened when there were a number of niches to exploit and that is not at all an unusual pattern in paleontology. (That means that a lot of forms appeared in a short time because there were openings they could exploit so the survival of different forms happened at a higher rate than would happen with more competition.) BTW, skunks and stink badgers look from the molecular data to have branched off before the mustelids did from a common relative with the procyonids or perhaps even from the procyonids (Current members: raccoons, kinkajous, coatis, cacomistle, lesser panda, etc.) Now, I know most people just skipped over that but i also know some other soft rock geeks said, "Woooooooooooooooooow!" (Soft rock refers to carbon based...) Sukie (not a vet) Recommended ferret health links: http://pets.groups.yahoo.com/group/ferrethealth/ http://ferrethealth.org/archive/ http://www.afip.org/ferrets/index.html http://www.miamiferret.org/ http://www.ferretcongress.org/ http://www.trifl.org/index.shtml http://homepage.mac.com/sukie/sukiesferretlinks.html [Posted in FML 6303]