The Prairie Dog (Cynomys Ludovicianus)

The black-tailed prairie dog is the Texas member of five species of stout, short-tailed ground squirrels, the Handbook of Texas says. Adults weigh two to three pounds, and a litter averages four or five young, which first come above ground at about six weeks. In 1841 George Wilkins Kendall found a prairie dog town that gave some food to the famished men of the Texan Santa Fe expedition. Biologist Vernon Bailey estimated 800 million in Texas in 1905. Poisoning from about 1914 emptied towns quickly, and the state's population is now put at about 2.2 million.

What the plaque says

Small burrowing rodent once symbolic of Old West. Estimates once placed Texas population in billions. Prairie dogs were so named because of their quick sharp barking and wagging tails. A vegetarian mammal related to the squirrel and ground hog, their homes are craftily built L-shaped burrows, 15 to 20 feet or more long; seldom connected with others in their "town". Declared pests to agriculture and range, town was established March 1964, to preserve remnant of a vanishing species. (1968)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Scurry County Museum — 1.2 mi
  Snyder's county museum on the Western Texas College campus, with the rifle used to shoot the white buffalo, an 1878 chuckwagon and the millionth barrel of the Canyon Reef oil boom.
• Heart of West Texas Museum — 21 mi
  Colorado City's museum in a restored downtown house, from a mammoth dug up at Lake Champion in 2001 to an Ice Age bison and the wartime telegrams sent to a local family.
• National WASP WWII Museum — 31 mi
  Hangar 1 at Avenger Field in Sweetwater, where the women of the WASP trained to fly every aircraft in the Army's arsenal in World War II, then waited thirty-three years to be called veterans.

More markers nearby

• Home County of Famous Frontiersman J. Wright Mooar — 1.3 mi
• Santa Fe Railway in Scurry County — 1.4 mi
• Scurry County's Canyon Reef Oil Field — 1.4 mi
• Channel of Deep Creek — 1.4 mi