Distribution and Habitat
Cape mole rats inhabit forested and savannah regions across the coastal regions of Western Cape and Eastern Cape provinces in South Africa. Isolated populations have also been reported from KwaZulu-Natal, just east of Lesotho, and from Mpumalanga. Although there are no formally recognised subspecies, this may be due to limited research on the species, and it has been proposed that the mole rats of KwaZulu-Natal may represent an entirely distinct species. They apparently prefer sandy loam, alluvium, or clay soils.
Fossils of Cape mole rats are known from the middle Pleistocene of Elandsfontein in the Western Cape. Fossils referable to the genus Georychus, but not to the living species, have been identified from the lower Pleistocene at Swartkrans.
Read more about this topic: Cape Mole Rat
Famous quotes containing the words distribution and/or habitat:
“The question for the country now is how to secure a more equal distribution of property among the people. There can be no republican institutions with vast masses of property permanently in a few hands, and large masses of voters without property.... Let no man get by inheritance, or by will, more than will produce at four per cent interest an income ... of fifteen thousand dollars] per year, or an estate of five hundred thousand dollars.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“Neither moral relations nor the moral law can swing in vacuo. Their only habitat can be a mind which feels them; and no world composed of merely physical facts can possibly be a world to which ethical propositions apply.”
—William James (1842–1910)