Cousin Connection of the Kinkajou

Hey Q and J: Do you know who the cousins of the Kinkajou are? Let's find out.

I went to wikipedia to find out. I don't remember too much about scientific classification so we are going to have to figure this out for ourselves.  I wonder can we find someone who can explain that to us --? The picutre on the right show all the different levels of scientific classification. Since LIFE is on the top I guess that means the petoskey stone would not have this type of classification, correcto?

So at wikipedia they have the list of classifications of the Kinkajou( see below). It's official species name is potos flavus. Hhmmmm I wonder what language that is? what does it mean? who named it the kinkajou?do all the countries that it lives in use the same name?

(Okay I looked it up. I was toooooo curious. Every species has two names (homo sapiens!). The first is the genus and the second is the species name. It's always in Latin.  Whoa! Why Latin...there must be some story there.)

Okay onwards. So then our friend the kinkajou has a family classification called the procyonidae (Deb made me take latin one year but i sure have no idea how to pronounce that). Click on that link and go see who the cousin of the kinkajou is!!!!!! You too Deb.

What's odd is that this little guy is in the order carnivora. Carnivora comes from two latin words "flesh" and "to devour". There are 280 species in that order. But this little "honey bear" almost always eats fruit.  I wonder why they put him in carnivora? Who gets to make those decisions anyway! How many other species in carnivora are vegetarians?

Why do you think it is important that we classify each and every living creature everywhere in the world?

Scientific classification
Kingdom:	Animalia
Phylum:	Chordata
Class:	Mammalia
Order:	Carnivora
Family:	Procyonidae
Genus:	Potos Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire & Cuvier, 1795
Species:	P. flavus
Binomial name
Potos flavus (Schreber, 1774)
Kinkajou range