Whoa, okay? First off, "weasel" is NOT a technical term so it can be used or misused as one likes, but it IS incorrect to refer to any FORMAL taxonomic category as being "the weasel family" or "weasel-like family", though those can be used as illustrations. For those who need the primer: Keep Picking Cucumbers Or Father Gets Sore -- Kingdom (Animalia, Planta...); Phylum (such as Protozoa, Chordata, Mullusca, etc.); Class (Mammalia for both us and ferrets); Order (Carnivora for ferrets, Primates for us); Family (Mustelidae for ferrets, Hominidea for us, though we share a between-classication with apes: Anthropodea and some experts wonder for excellent reasons if Hominidea isn't too much of a splitter attitude); Genus (ferrets are in Mustela just as weasels are but with separate species, while we are in Homo); species (Hey, something we share with domestic ferrets is that both grouping have some debates on species naming right now.). Notice that tigers are in Felidea -- a different family within Carnivora from Mustelidea and that the split goes back a decent way and is without debate, but that there is debate about the Hominidea/Pongidea split, plus humans of various ilks have been around for only a few millions of years -- not long at all. Note that there can also be numerous super- and sub- classifications so that nestled around Mammalia are the names Vertebrata (between Chordata and Mammalia), and what-ever-the-heck the formal one is for the placental mammals since I forget that, being very rusty. Also note that it is correct to capitalize the genus name but to not capitalize the species name in mammology -- this is NOT necessarily the same in some of the other specializations such a botany. You can also refer to our extremely close (taxonomically, morphologically, and genetically) cousins the bonobos as P. paniscus or as Pan paniscus, but NEVER as Pan p. It is ESSENTIAL that people realize that groupings are NOT written in stone, and that it has often been recognized that the closer something is to US the more likely we are to notice differences so that there may be things lumped into the same categories in Mullusca which would never be lumped together in Chordata; some things lumped together in Chondrichthyes would be considered miles apart if they were in Mammalia; within Mammalia we are more liklely to see differences between humans and other apes. Heck, you've see people who make a big deal of separations as small as race -- that's taking splitting to the most extreme level. (Yeah, I'm a lumper and folks who don't like it can lump it.) Okay, I may be rusty as all get-out but I was the student curator for the comparative mammalian osteology/dentition/fossil collection of the Anatomy Dept. of SUNY SB for over 4 years so this isn't unknown stuff for me. Confused yet? [Posted in FML issue 2461]