Tamias

Tamias is a genus of chipmunk in the tribe Marmotini within the squirrel family Sciuridae, containing a single living species, the eastern chipmunk. The genus name comes from the Greek for treasurer, steward or housekeeper, a reference to the animals' habit of collecting and storing food for winter. The genus was historically treated as including all chipmunk species divided into three subgenera, but genetic studies have shown the divergence between those three groups to be comparable to the genetic distance between Marmota and Spermophilus, and they are now often treated as separate genera. Besides its one living species, Tamias includes several fossil species from Eurasia and one from North America, spanning the Miocene through the Pleistocene.