Doubling the number of species of hand-standing spotted skunks

Picture a skunk. You're probably thinking of a stocky animal, around the size of a housecat, black with white stripes, like Pepé Le Pew. That describes North America's most common skunk, the striped skunk, but they also have smaller, spotted cousins. Scientists still have a lot to learn about spotted skunks, starting with how many kinds of them even exist—over the years, the number of recognized species has ranged from two to fourteen, and lately, scientists have agreed there are four. But in a new paper in Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution, researchers analyzed skunk DNA and found that there aren't four species of spotted skunk after all: there are seven.