Discovery
Golden hamsters originate from Syria and were found in 1839 by British zoologist George Robert Waterhouse. Their natural condition is a dry, hot desert climate. The widespread notion that the name hamster derives from the German for 'hoarding (food)' is wrong: rather, the German verb hamstern derives from the name of the animal, owing to their respective behavior. Hamster probably derives from the proto-Slavic chomẽstar (compare also with Russian 'хомячок', 'hohmyachok' or Polish 'chomik').
Waterhouse's original specimen was a female hamster—he named it Cricetus auratus or the "golden hamster". The skin of the specimen is kept at the British Museum of Natural History.
In 1930, Israel Aharoni, a zoologist and professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, captured a mother hamster and her litter of pups in Aleppo, Syria. The hamsters were bred in Jerusalem as laboratory animals. Some escaped from the cage through a hole in the floor, and most of the wild golden hamsters in Israel today are believed to be descended from this litter.
Descendants of the captive hamsters were shipped to Britain in 1931, where they came under the care of the Wellcome Bureau of Scientific Research. They bred well and two more pairs were given to the Zoological Society of London in 1932. The descendants of these were passed on to private breeders in 1937. A separate stock of hamsters was exported from Syria to the USA in 1971, but apparently none of today's North American pets is descended from these (at least in the female line), because recent mitochondrial DNA studies have established that all domestic golden hamsters are descended from one female – probably the one captured in 1930 in Syria.
Since the species was named, the genus Cricetus has been subdivided and this species (together with several others) was separated into the genus Mesocricetus, leading to the currently accepted scientific name for the golden hamster of Mesocricetus auratus.
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