Brown palm civet

The brown palm civet, also called Jerdon's palm civet, is a viverrid endemic to the Western Ghats of India, with a range from Castle Rock in Goa to Kalakkad Mundanthurai Tiger Reserve at the southern tip. William Thomas Blanford named it in 1885 from a skull and pelt collected at Kodaikanal, in honour of Thomas Jerdon, and two subspecies are recognised. It has uniformly brown fur, darker round the head, neck, shoulders, legs and tail, with a dark tail that sometimes has a pale tip, no distinct markings, and reversed hair growth on the nape like the golden palm civet. Males weigh 3.6 to 4.3 kilograms with a head and body length of 430 to 620 millimetres. It lives in rainforest at 500 to 1,300 metres, in a landscape fragmented by tea and coffee plantations. It is solitary and nocturnal and chiefly frugivorous, an important seed disperser of the Western Ghats rainforest.