Animal etymology
A gerbil is a small cute pet, quite like a hamster.
A French scientist first named them in 1867, giving them the latin name gerbillus unguiculatus. They live in the plains and steppes around Mongolia, China and Russia. Gerbils belong to a group of species called desert rats, which feels really harsh.
A jerboa is like a tiny tiny kangaroo.
There's a number of different species of jerboa but those ones with the best ears are from southern Mongolia and western China. That sounds familiar.
They move by hopping erratically (and somewhat inefficiently). Their feet bones have also fused into a 'cannon bone' to help them jump further. So far I feel they're getting a much better nomenclature deal than the desert rats.
Gerbils and jerboa are both rodents (which means they have continuously growing teeth), but other than that they are, at least in terms of taxonomy, fairly distantly related. They just happen to have ended up filling a very similar ecological niche - convergent evolution! That's also how everything will become crab.
This morning I was brushing my teeth when it occurred to me how similar their names are. I started off wondering if they were similar species and while, yes, they live in similar places, they aren't related. So why the names?
Jerboa is just a latinised spelling of the Arabic name for them. My html skillz do not extend to writing Arabic yet. So much like we listened to a Hindustani speaker tell us what they call a dense, tree-filled area, then dutifully wrote down 'jungle' because that's what it sounded like, some naturalist listened to an Arabic speaker talk about these little hopping guys called jerboa and then wrote that down.
Then, some time later, we noticed these other little rodents. They were smaller, had shorter tails and only little legs, but they were kinda the same colour and in the same area? So we called them a cute, small version of jerboa: gerbil.
