Hello my name is Oliver and I'm 2 months old. I'm learning how much fun I can have being a hamster. Sleeping all day and eating delish-ious things! I hope to get to know all of you for a very long time.
Like most members of the subfamily, the Golden Hamster has expandable cheek pouches, (which reach from its cheeks to its shoulders. In the wild, (hamsters are larder hoarders, (and they use their cheek pouches to transport food to their burrows. They can load a remarkable amount of food into their pouches; their name in the local Arabic dialect in the area where they are found translates as "father of saddlebags" ??? ????. If food is plentiful, (they will store it in large amounts, (and it has been reported that 25Kg of grain was found in the burrow of a single hamster.
Most hamsters in American and English pet stores are Syrian Hamsters. Teddy Bear is a term sometimes used for the longhaired variety of the Syrian Hamster, (and the so-called Black Bear hamster is just a Syrian Hamster with black fur. All of them may well indeed be the descendants of a single mother.
Golden Hamsters have been used in scientific research, (in the study of many diseases, (and also in the study of behaviour. They have a number of fixed action patterns that are readily observed, (including scent-marking.
Discovery of the Syrian Hamster
In 1839 British naturalist George Robert Waterhouse reportedly found an elderly female hamster in Syria, (naming it Cricetus auratus, the Golden Hamster. The hamster's fur was on display at the British Museum (Natural History)
The Syrian Hamster was then ignored by European science for the next century. Around 1930, Israel aharoni was an israeli zoologist best known for locating and collecting a litter of syrian hamsters, thus allowing them to be bred and turned into common...
[ By the time he got back to his lab, (most had died or escaped. The remaining hamsters were given to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (where they were successfully bred. (so they were named Mesocricetus auratus, (although they were probably the same species. Mesocricetus auratus is the currently accepted scientific name of Syrian Hamsters.
Descendants of these hamsters were shipped to scientific labs around the world, (for use as research animals. They arrived in the United Kingdom[ in 1931, (and in 1938 reached the United States. Just about all Golden Hamsters are descended from the original litter found in Syria, (except for a few that were brought into the United States by travellers who found them in the desert. A separate stock of hamsters was imported into the US in 1971, (but it isn't known if any of today's North American pets are descended from them.
