[QUOTE=psychonaut]
Define “type”. For certain definitions, the answer is no, of course not. There are probably millions of animal species, subspecies, breeds, etc.; surely they can’t all have their own unique adjectives. I doubt there are different adjectives for African and Indian elephants, for example. Even some more general taxons probably don’t have their own adjectives, at least in common parlance.
[/QUOTE]
You’re probably right, but English is equipped to coin words that will be clearly understood, at least by the intended audience. To manufacture one on the spot, I’ll bet that nobody has ever had occasion to distinguish diurnal and nocturnal animals, taken together, from those active predominantly at dawn or sunset (“crepuscular” animals, paralleling “nocturnal animals” and “diurnal animals”), but the proper term would be noncrepuscular. Made up on the spot as an example, but would be instantly clear to anyone with an interest in animal behavior patterns.
In the event I were writing something for Colibri, Darwin’s Finch, and their colleagues, and wanted to refer to a characteristic of African elephants (and perhaps their extinct close relatives) not shared by their Indian cousins, the proper term would be loxodontine, from the genus name for African elephants.
As I noted above, English seems to have largely used -ine affixed to the stem of the genus name for this purpose-- two other useful related suffixes are -id and -oid, both clipped from the “official” Latin endings for family and superfamily, -idae and -oidea respectively. To help clarify this, canine would refer to characteristics of dogs, or possibly of dogs and their closest relatives (wolves, coyotes, the dingo, etc.); canid would reference all doglike forms in Family Canidae, including the foxes, the jackal, and some peculiar South American and Southeast Asian forms most of us have probably never heard of; canoid would reference the larger group of dogs, wolves, foxes, bears, raccoons, coatimundis, pandas, wolverines, weasels, skunks, and all their allies, in contradistinction to feloids such as the cats, the cheetah, the mongooses, the aardwolf, the hyenas, the fossa, etc.
