Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- adjective Burrowing or living underground.
- adjective Relating to or used for burrowing or digging.
from The Century Dictionary.
- Digging, burrowing, or excavating, especially in the ground; fodient: as, a fossorial animal.
- Fit or used for digging or burrowing: as, a fossorial limb.
- Able to dig or burrow; being a burrower; specifically, of or pertaining to the Fossores, Fossoria, or Fodientia: as, fossorial nature or habits; a fossorial insect or quadruped.
- noun An animal which digs into the earth for a retreat or residence, and whose feet are adapted for that purpose; a burrowing animal.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- adjective Fitted for digging, adapted for burrowing or digging
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- adjective Of, pertaining to, or adapted for
digging orburrowing .
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- adjective (of limbs and feet) adapted for digging
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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Of special interest to me right now are the dinosaurs of the British Wealden (of course), the intriguing tie-ins between Wealden fossil collectors, Conan Doyle's Lost World and the Piltdown fiasco, convergence between different fossorial tetrapods, manatee evolution, and British big cats (yes, really).
Archive 2006-01-01 Darren Naish 2006
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Slow-worms are nocturnal and semi-fossorial and mostly occur in well-vegetated places with thick ground cover and loose soils.
Archive 2006-05-01 Darren Naish 2006
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These include colonial fossorial rodents (marmots, ground squirrels) large birds of prey, and phytophagous insects (grasshoppers).
Kazakh steppe 2008
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Four of the endemics are representatives of the three endemic genera in the hotspot: a rodent (Microakodontomys transitorius), known only from a single specimen collected in 1986 in the Brasília National Park; the Candango mouse (Juscelinomys candango), a semi-fossorial rodent first discovered in 1960 on the site of the capital, Brasília, then under construction, and which has never again been collected; and the cerrado mouse (Thalpomys cerradensis) and hairy-eared cerrado mouse (T. lasiotis).
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And those big hands that moles have testify to their underground lifestyle, fancy word -- fossorial.
Urban Wildlife Watch: Moles and Shrews DNLee 2008
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-- Pearsonomys annectans Patterson, 1992, a semi-fossorial Chilean murid.
Archive 2006-03-01 Darren Naish 2006
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And those big hands that moles have testify to their underground lifestyle, fancy word -- fossorial.
Archive 2008-11-01 DNLee 2008
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The aquatic origin seems very illogical since no aquatic lineage of lizard has ever lost its limbs but fossorial lizards have undergone limb reduction or loss on multiple occasions.
In the, "it's so sad, it's funny" category today... - The Panda's Thumb 2005
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Burrow structure and fossorial ecology of the springhare Pedetes capensis in Botswana.
Chapter 11 1991
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In seeking food and avoiding enemies in different habitats the limbs and feet radiate in four diverse directions; they either become _fossorial_ or adapted to digging habits,
Form and Function A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology
fbharjo commented on the word fossorial
fossorial a word I dig, and its not a fossil, though I may have dug it up
January 16, 2007