Animal · Syria, Türkiye
Golden hamster
Mesocricetus auratus — the name this animal has in the language scientists everywhere share.
The golden hamster is a small sandy-brown rodent that digs long tunnels under the dry fields of northern Syria and southern Turkey. Almost every pet hamster in the world is related to a single family dug up near Aleppo in 1930.
Picture credit: Adamjennison111 (CC BY 2.5) · Adamjennison111 (CC BY 2.5) · Patrik Čech (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where does the golden hamster live?
Home: dry farmland and steppe on the plateau around Aleppo.
In the wild it lives in these countries: Syria, Türkiye.
Conservation status from the IUCN: endangered.
The short profile
Fully grown: 13–18 cm long, plus a stubby tail. It weighs about 0.12 kilograms. On the menu: both plants and meat.
The story behind it
A wild golden hamster spends the day underground, in a burrow with a sleeping room, a toilet corner and a pantry. At dusk it comes up and stuffs seeds, green shoots and beetles into cheek pouches that reach back to its shoulders. Back home it squeezes the pouches empty with its paws and stacks the food in neat little piles. The species lives only on a small plateau of farmland in northern Syria and just across the border in Turkey, where ploughs and poison have made it rare. In 1930 the zoologist Israel Aharoni dug out a mother and her young near Aleppo, and their descendants became the pet hamsters kept all over the world. So the same animal is common in children's bedrooms and endangered in the wild.
Find it on the globe
Golden hamster 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
How big is a golden hamster?
It is 13 to 18 centimetres long, about the length of a pencil, and weighs roughly as much as a small apple. Its tail is so short that you can easily miss it.
Where do wild golden hamsters live?
Only on a dry plateau of fields around Aleppo in northern Syria, reaching just across the border into southern Turkey. That whole home range is smaller than many European countries.
Why is the pet hamster common when the wild one is endangered?
Pet hamsters are bred by the million in homes and shops, so there is no shortage of them. In Syria the wild animals lost their burrows to ploughs and building, and farmers treat them as pests, which is why the IUCN lists the wild species as endangered.
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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