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Comment by a1k0n | Hacker News Reader

That's a chipmunk, not a squirrel.

I'm not an expert on squirrels, but that could be a ground squirrel[1] of some sort. Some varieties of ground squirrel look a lot like chipmunks.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_squirrel

A quick search for "striped ground squirrel" turned up only one variety, the thirteen-lined ground squirrel. The animal in the photo has stripes like a chipmunk.

Look for stripes on the face: without them, it's probably a squirrel. Both ground squirrels and chipmunks have body stripes, so the face is a better indicator.

http://naturemappingfoundation.org/natmap/facts/chipmunk_vs_...

http://www.differencebetween.info/difference-between-squirre...

You're right, there's no stripes on its face. I stand corrected.

Sadly, that was my most upvoted comment in ~9.5 years on this site.

Ahh, I was about to unvote you, but now I can't bear to do it. Keep my upvote.

To my (admittedly untrained) eye, the picture looks a lot like an Indian palm squirrel (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d1/Indian_P...) – which does have stripes on its back.

That's not a chipmunk. This is a chipmunk.

http://pmdvod.nationalgeographic.com/NG_Video_DEV/935/311/le...

All chipmunks are squirrels.

Family Sciuridae! So they are, I didn't know that.

I'll be damned. This should be squirrel fact #1.

A Chipmunk is a type of Squirrel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squirrel

Pretty sure it's a palm squirrel.

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=palm+squirrel&source=lnms&...

My University's (Minnesota) mascot is a gopher, but the physical mascot is a chipmunk/squirrel (debated) name Goldy Gopher - but it's definitely not a gopher. These rodents can be confusing!

Speaking of gopher... could this be a way to get images on gopher:// pages?

It's a webpage, not an image.

It's both! That's the whole point - the same sequence of bytes can be interpreted as either an HTML web page or a JPEG image, and the page itself demonstrates both at the same time.

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