Tamias is a
genus of
chipmunks in the tribe
Marmotini of the
squirrel family. The genus includes a single living species, the
eastern chipmunk (Tamias striatus).[1] The genus name Tamias (
Greek: ταμίας) means "treasurer", "steward", or "housekeeper",[2] which is a reference to the animals' role in plant dispersal through their habit of collecting and storing food for winter use.[3]
The genus Tamias was formerly divided into three subgenera that, in sum, included all chipmunk species: Tamias, the
eastern chipmunk and other fossil species; Eutamias, of which the
Siberian chipmunk (E. sibiricus) is the only living member; and Neotamias, which includes the 23 remaining, mostly western, species. These classifications are subjective, and most taxonomies over the twentieth century have placed the chipmunks in a single genus. However, studies of
mitochondrial DNA show that the divergence between each of the three chipmunk groups is comparable to the genetic dissimilarity between Marmota and Spermophilus,[4][5][6][7] so they are now often considered as separate genera.
In addition to the eastern chipmunk, some fossil species from
Eurasia have been assigned to this genus:
^Henry George Liddell; Robert Scott. (1940). A Greek-English Lexicon, revised and augmented throughout by Sir Henry Stuart Jones with the assistance of Roderick McKenzie. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
^Musser, G. G.; Durden, L. A.; Holden, M. E.; Light, J. E. (2010). "Systematic review of endemic Sulawesi squirrels (Rodentia, Sciuridae), with descriptions of new species of associated sucking lice (Insecta, Anoplura), and phylogenetic and zoogeographic assessments of sciurid lice". Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History. 339 (339): 1–260.
doi:
10.1206/695.1.
hdl:
2246/6067.
S2CID82712592.
^Ray, Clayton E (September 1965). "A New Chipmunk, Tamias aristus, from the Pleistocene of Georgia". Journal of Paleontology. 39 (5): 1016–1022.
JSTOR3555320.