- Animals
- ›Chordates
- ›Vertebrates
- ›Mammals
- ›Therians
- ›Placental Mammals
- ›Primates, Rodents, and Allies
- ›Rodents
- ›Ctenohystricans
- ›Hystricognaths
- ›New World Porcupines
- ›New World Porcupines
- ›Neotropical and North American Porcupines
- ›Erethizon

North American Porcupine
Erethizon dorsatum
The North American porcupine (Erethizon dorsatum), also known as the Canadian porcupine or common porcupine, is a large rodent in the New World porcupine family. The beaver is the only rodent in North America that is larger than the North American porcupine. The porcupine is a caviomorph rodent whose ancestors rafted across the Atlantic from Africa to Brazil over 30 million years ago, and then migrated to North America during the Great American Interchange after the...
Listen
Looking for field recordings…
Where it lives
Recorded sightings
—
geo-referenced records in GBIF, from museums, herbaria and field observers.
Drag the globe to turn it. Dots are where records exist, not a range map; darker means more records.
In the stacks
Searching the stacks…
Every page naming Erethizon dorsatum in the Biodiversity Heritage Library →
This page is assembled live from iNaturalist, GBIF, Wikipedia, the Source Library and the Internet Archive. It is not yet part of the hand-edited codex. iNaturalist taxon 44026.