Animal · Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia
Guinea pig
Cavia porcellus — the name this animal has in the language scientists everywhere share.
The guinea pig is a small, round rodent from the Andes that whistles for food and hops in the air when it feels happy. It has no tail you can see, it needs a friend of its own kind, and it has lived beside people for thousands of years.
Picture credit: Gzen92 (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Shreya.Bhopal (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Mittens666 (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where does the guinea pig live?
Home: Homes and farmyards worldwide; its wild relatives live in the Andes.
In the wild it lives in these countries: Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, Colombia.
The short profile
Fully grown: 20–25 cm long. It weighs about 1 kilograms. On the menu: plants.
The story behind it
High in the Andes, people were already keeping guinea pigs around their houses about seven thousand years ago, long before anyone in Europe had seen one. The animals were kept for meat, and in parts of Peru and Ecuador that is still true today. When Spanish ships carried them across the ocean, the new name made no sense at all: a guinea pig is not a pig, and it does not come from Guinea. Baby guinea pigs are born with a full coat, open eyes and tiny teeth, and they can run after their mother within a few hours. Like us, guinea pigs cannot make vitamin C inside their bodies, so a bowl of fresh greens every day is not a treat but a need. A happy guinea pig does something people call popcorning: it suddenly springs straight up off all four feet, twists, and lands as if nothing happened.
Find it on the globe
Guinea pig 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
Does a guinea pig really have no tail?
It has a few tiny tail bones, but they stay hidden under the skin and fur, so from the outside the body just ends in a soft, round rump.
Where do guinea pigs come from?
Why does a guinea pig need fresh vegetables every single day?
Almost all mammals build their own vitamin C, but guinea pigs and humans cannot. A guinea pig needs about 10 mg a day from its food, or it gets ill.
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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