King genet

The king genet is a genet that George Robert Waterhouse described in 1838 from a single skin collected on Bioko in Equatorial Guinea. It occurs in scattered pockets of West and Central Africa, in Equatorial Guinea, Liberia, Ghana, the Ivory Coast and the Republic of the Congo. It has pale yellowish to grey fur covered with dark spots that are squarer and more elongated on the back, a large skull with broad ears, a snout with dark lines marked by white spots, darker spotted limbs, black underparts and a short stout tail with four to six rings. Its colouring is thought to give camouflage in thick forest. It has not been recorded since 1946, so the IUCN lists it as Data Deficient, meaning that too little is known to judge how threatened it is.