Scientists Like Some Animals Better than Others (Hint: Bears)

In the fight for attention from researchers, there are winners and there are civets. That's what researchers found when they analyzed almost 16,500 published papers about animals from walruses to weasels. They saw clear trends in which animals are the most popular to study. And it matters because the most popular animals aren't necessarily the ones most in need of attention. Zoe Brooke, a researcher at the Zoological Society of London, and her coauthors looked at every peer-reviewed paper they could find that was published between 1900 and 2010 about an animal in the order Carnivora. This is a set of 286 mammal species that all—as their name suggests—eat meat, at least sometimes. Medical papers that used animals to model a disease were excluded (sorry, lab mice). Papers on pets were also left out, though feral cats and dogs were fair game. Winners: Big Guys There are 15 families within ...