Animal · Italy, Morocco, Algeria
Crested porcupine
Hystrix cristata — the name this animal has in the language scientists everywhere share.
The crested porcupine is a big night-roaming rodent whose back is covered in black and white quills, some of them as long as your forearm. It is the only porcupine that lives in Europe.
Picture credit: Drew Avery (CC BY 2.0) · Drew Avery (CC BY 2.0) · Quartl (CC BY-SA 3.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where does the crested porcupine live?
Home: Dry hills, scrub and farmland in Africa and Italy.
In the wild it lives in these countries: Italy, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Sudan, Ethiopia, Tanzania.
Conservation status from the IUCN: not in danger.
The short profile
Fully grown: 60-83 cm long, with quills up to 35 cm. It weighs about 18 kilograms. On the menu: plants.
The story behind it
A porcupine cannot shoot its quills, whatever the old stories say. When something comes too close, it raises the whole crest, rattles the hollow quills on its tail like a rattlesnake and then charges backwards, trying to drive the spines into the attacker. Loose quills stick in the skin and stay there, which is why even a lion learns to keep its distance. Porcupines spend the day in a cave or a burrow and walk long distances at night, digging up roots and bulbs. They also gnaw on old bones, which gives them calcium and keeps their ever-growing front teeth sharp; whole collections of bones have been found in their dens. Some crested porcupines reach an age of over twenty years.
Find it on the globe
Crested porcupine is there as a tiny animated figure that breathes and looks around. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.
It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.
Questions children ask
Can a porcupine shoot its quills?
No, that is a myth. The quills only come loose when something touches them, which happens when the porcupine backs into an attacker at speed.
Are there porcupines in Europe?
Yes, in Italy. The crested porcupine is the only porcupine species in Europe and lives in hills, scrub and farmland across much of the Italian mainland and on Sicily.
Why do porcupines gnaw on bones?
Bones give them calcium, which they need for their quills and skeleton. Gnawing also wears down their front teeth, which keep growing all their life.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page was checked against public reference sources before publication. Where sources genuinely disagree, the text says so.
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