Z is for Zebra

Z is for Zebra.

Okay, whatcha gonna do?  Z is the coolest letter in the alphabet, but there just aren't that many animals that start with it.  Like there's Zona, a Madagascar fish, but other than its first letter, it doesn't have much to recommend it.  And there's zalmoxes, an extinct rodent-like creature, but I've already done an extinct rodent-like creature.  And there's zanclodon, a dinosaur, which is way cool, except it turns out zanclodon probably isn't even the right name for it.

So it's down to Z is for Zebra.

Though a zebra is an equine, I heard somewhere it shares less DNA in common with a horse than we do with a chimpanzee.  I didn't bother to check the fact, though.  Really, who cares?

I mean, there's so many cool names they could have used for an animal.  Spiny Tailed Zook for example, or Zoobly, or Zurgonojapes.  But no, none of those are real words.  So I'm down to Z for Zebra.

Here's a thing, I bet you didn't know.  Zoologists used to think zebras were white with black stripes, but it turns out it's the other way around.  That's the sort of thing zoologists care about I guess.
Zoologist isn't an animal.  Neither is zoatrope or zoom-zoom.

Oh, well.

Z is for Zebra.

Y is for Yeti

Y is for Yeti.

The Yeti is an ape-like creature of the Himalayas.  In 1929. Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Howard-Bury coined the name Abominable Snowman, but Yeti is the preferred term.  Abominable Snowman sounds like it has a bad attitude and a carrot for a nose.  The Yeti is a cryptid, an animal which hasn't been documented by the scientific community.  Every cryptid dreams of becoming a real, verifiable critter, losing that "cryp" in front of its name and becoming a tid like the rest of us.

Some animals have made it; the first preserved platypus displayed in Britain was damaged when scientists tried to cut off the duckbill, assuming it was a taxidermied fake.  Giant Pandas were also once considered only legendary ditto for Narwhales.

The Yeti, on a scale of plausibility from 1 to 10, with 1 being jackalopes and 10 being coelacanths, stands at about 3, somewhere between the Loch Ness Monster and Sasquatch.

There world is a sadder and dimmer place as one by one we consign the might-be's to the status of mere folklore and earth's fauna is reduced to a very large but finite number of organisms, diminishing almost daily because of extinction.  So even though no one seriously believes in the Yeti anymore, I hope he hangs in there for at least one more generation, the last of a short list of cryptids.

X is for Xanclomys

X is for Xanclomys.

If this thing looks like a rat, it very nearly is.

It, and its relatives in the multituberculates thrived about a hundred million years ago, back when mammals were still making up their minds between being placental or marsupial.  Some were as large as beavers, some as small as mice.  They lived in the ground, and up in the trees.  If you were a stegosaurus, you could hardly move without stepping on a multituberculate, which is convenient for modern fossil hunters.

The multituberculates occupied virtually every niche as modern rodents: there were squirrel-like multituberculates, hamster-like multituberculates, for all I know, even cute little bunny-rabbit-multituberculates.  They were so much like rodents their own mamas must've thought they were; they had rodent-like bone structure, even long rodent-like incisors.

But they were not rodents; they were no more closely related to rodents than we are.

The rodents appeared about 66 million years ago, after xanclomys and the other multituberculates had already gotten a 60-million-year head start.  But the rodents had one crucial advantage.  The posterior of their incisors has no enamel, meaning it will grow the entire lifetime of the animal.  When the animal gnaws, the incisor gets a razor-like edge.  Instead of wearing away, like poor old xanclomys, the rodent is equipped with a set of ever-lasting, self-sharpening teeth.

The multituberculates had a good run of it; they lived longer than any other lineage of mammals, but they were no match for the rodents.  Now there's not a single multituberculate left, not one, and our friend xanclomys is known to us by only one remaining fossil.

The moral of the story is, if you make your living acting like a rat, you run the risk of being outdone when a real rat comes along.

Bonus Letter: P is for Platypus

P is for Platypus.

When the first Platypus, stuffed and mounted, was presented to the British Royal Society, the esteemed colleagues assumed it had to be a fake, and attempted to remove the duckbill with scissors.  They imagined it was some species of beaver with a duckbill stitched on.  They can be forgiven, I think, for this error; the platypus is such an extraordinary creature on so many counts, it's hard to believe such a thing can be real.

The platypus' bill is by no means its most remarkable feature, but it's a place to start.  Like ducks and hadrosaurs, the platybus uses its bill to dig for food on river bottoms, but the platypus' bill is equipped with electroreceptors.  When it dives, it closes its eyes, nose, and ears, and locates prey, by picking up electrical currents generated by muscular contractions.  Oh, my lord, how cool is that?

The platypus also has the distinction of being the only venomous mammal.  The male has a spur on its hind foot that excretes a venom fatal to smaller animals and excruciating to humans.

Humans like to imagine they are at the top of the evolutionary ladder, and that platypi and such-like are primitve and less-evolved.  But indeed, the platypus is perfectly evolved to suit its environment.  Can you say as much, oh, sunscreen-wearing biped?  The platypus is an amazing and beautiful creature and deserves our respect.

Oh, yeah, and it lays eggs.

W is for Woodlouse

W is for Woodlouse.

The is an ugly name for an inoffensive and even beneficial creature.  As children, we called them roly-polies, because when you handled one, it rolled itself into a neat little armored ball.  So far as I know, I have never harmed a woodlouse in anger, and the more I know about them, the gladder I didn't.

The woodlouse came to America aboard European ships, but unlike other invasive species, such as rats, surveyors, and dogs, it has not caused much stir because it makes so little fuss, and because it's so good at munching dead leaves and turning them to compost.

You might think the woodlouse is some sort of centipede, but nothing could be further from the truth.  It is actually a crustacean, and the only land-dwelling crustacean on the earth.  The flavor, in case you're thinking of eating one, is like urine.  So I am told by a reliable source, although this means some brave soul not only ate a woodlouse but sipped urine as a basis of comparison.

V is for Vulture

V is for Vulture.

I have a theory that the number of highways has had a direct correlation to the increase in the number of vultures.  This is only conjecture and is neither here nor there, but it must be correct, right?  And yet many species of vulture are endangered.

Humans have great dislike for vultures, and I myself would rather behold a flock of bluebirds on my front porch than a flock of vultures.  A the collective noun for vultures, by the way, is a kettle of vultures.  This is when they're in flight.  When they're perched in trees, they're called a committee, and when they're eating, they're called a wake.

Actually, the vulture is not an animal, it is three different animals at least.  Allow me to explain.  The birds we lump under the term "vulture" actually refers to three different groups of birds that are not closely related, but resemble each other in behavior and appearance because of convergent evolution.  If you fly around looking for dead things to eat, eventually you'll wind up looking like a vulture.  The fact that vultures belong to three different species tells us a couple of things.  1.  Evolution really needs vultures because if there isn't one handy, it'll come up with one.  2.  When it comes to vultures, most people don't take the time to discern the subtle differences, and yet those same people will go on and on about how every sunset is unique and no two snowflakes are alike.

Vultures serve an indispensable service for which we look down on them.  And why?  Because they eat dead things.  Well, check your refrigerator, Chuckles, and let me know how many live animals you have in there.  Humans and vultures both eat dead things.  Humans pay someone to bring dead things to them is the main difference.  That, and that vultures can fly.

U is for Unicorn

U is for Unicorn.

You will say the unicorn is purely mythological, but I say it is not.  The unicorn is clearly a rhinoceros as imagined by someone who'd heard a rhinoceros described but never seen one for himself.  "But," you protest, "a unicorn is a horse, and a rhinoceros looks nothing like a horse."  Bear in mind that hippopotamus means "water horse."  A hippopotamus resembles a horse no more closely than a rhinoceros.  Clearly, the ancients had a much broader and looser idea of what horses look like than we do.

Marco Polo described unicorns as scarcely smaller than elephants. They have the hair of a buffalo and feet like an elephant's. They have a single large black horn in the middle of the forehead... They have a head like a wild boar's… They spend their time by preference wallowing in mud and slime. They are very ugly brutes to look at.

The modern unicorn, unlike the rhinoceros, is a thing of beauty, but it has been photo-shopped.

The unicorn horn, called an alicorn, was believed to have medicinal properties based on the general notion that anything rare and wonderful is worth chopping off and grinding into powder.  Unfortunately unicorns were not lovable beasts like you see on the covers of little girls' lunchboxes.  They were fierce and dangerous.  They had horns on their heads and weren't afraid to use them.

One way to catch a unicorn was to stand in front of a tree and holler insulting remarks at it such as, "Hey, one-horn!  You look like a rhinoceros!"  Then when the unicorn came charging, step out of the way at the very last second and boink!  The unicorn would drive its horn into the tree and be stuck.

The preferred method, however, was to find a virgin.  Virgins are almost rare as unicorns, but if you could get a virgin, have her sit in a secluded place and wait.  Pretty soon a unicorn would come and put its head in her lap, guaranteed.  Unicorns are drawn to virgins like flies to cow poop.

This is surely one of the goofier notions ever set forth, and we owe it to none other than Leonardo Da Vinci, who records this "fact" in one of his notebooks.  I imagine Leonardo had a good laugh about this from the grave - the unicorn tidbit must've been a booby trap for unwary chumps who went through his papers after his death looking for ideas to steal.

T is for Tapir

T is for Tapir.

The tapir looks like a pig, only with a more flexible snout.  Except, it's not a pig.  It's more closely related to horses and rhinoceroses.  About 55 million years ago, there were some odd-toed ungulates hanging around in Asia.  Some of them said, "We're going to evolve into magnificent creatures that will gallop and whinny."  Others said, "We will evolve into formidable creatures with horns growing out of our faces."  The tapir ancestors said, "We're going to evolve into pig-like animals, but with a more flexible snout."  The others said, "Have it your way."

Tapirs don't have many natural predators, but due to habitat loss are considered vulnerable.

They keep their snouts to the ground in search of food, and enjoy nothing more than wallowing in some nice refreshing mud to cool down.  Tapirs are very nice animals and they deserve all good things, but their lifestyle sounds a little like a pig, doesn't it?  Again, I'm not judging, I'm just observing.  This is what scientists call "convergent evolution."  Species that occupy similar niches in similar habitats end up adapting in similar ways.  Bottom line, if you live like a pig for long enough, eventually you'll turn into one.

S is for Sphinx

S is for Sphinx.

If you have the body of a lion and the head of a human, you can qualify as a sphinx, but if you really want to go whole-hog, you need the wings of an eagle as well.

According to Greeks, the Sphinx was the daughter of the two-headed dog Orthus - brother of the more famous, three-headed Cerberus.  (Hades could have used Orthus as a guard dog, but he was like, "Who wants to deal with a two-headed mutt?")  The mother was the Chimera, an animal with a snake for a tail, a lion's head and a goat's head.  The goat's head seems not so much terrifying as inconvenient.  In any case, the Greeks believed that if a two-headed dog mated with a lion-goat-headed snake-tailed monster, the result would naturally be a human-headed lion, possibly with wings.

The Sphinx stood at the gates of Thebes, a city in Egypt, asking a riddle, and if you didn't know the answer, she'd strangle you.  You already know the riddle and the answer because it's pretty old, but in those days, no one had heard it, and she killed a lot of people.  Why someone with a lion's body would strangle people is another riddle altogether.

The name Sphinx means strangler, but it's really just an example of how the Greeks got an Egyptian myth all bungled up.  Sphinx is probably a corruption of Shesepankh, which meant living image and referred to the statue of the Sphinx, specifically the Great Sphinx of Giza.  Far from being a monster, she symbolized the power of the pharaohs.

That's the way it is sometimes.  You create a monumental work of art, symbol of your national pride, and your neighbors turn it into a monster.

R is for Rock Hyrax

R is for Rock Hyrax.

Looks like a rodent, doesn't it?  It's not, though, it's a whole nother thing.  Its closest relatives are the modern-day elephant and the manatee.  Take a minute to get your head around the idea that elephants and manatees are related to each other.

They are social and noisy and they live in rocky areas in Central Africa.  They spend a lot of time sunning themselves because they have incomplete thermoregulation, or at least that's the excuse they give.
Rock Hyraxes are not kosher, which is surprising Leviticus goes into that much detail, but they do rate a favorable mention in Proverbs, "The rock badgers are a people not mighty, yet they make their home in the cliffs."

In addition to Rock Badgers, the Rock Hyrax are known as Rock Rabbits, Dassies, Pimbis, Peleles, Wibaris, Klipdas, and Ne'ers.  But Hyrax is the coolest name because it sounds the most like something Dr. Seuss would have come up with.

Bonus Letter: T is for Tiktaalik Roseae

T is for Tiktaalik Roseae.

According to the time-honored rules of the A-to-Z Blogging Challenge, I'm permitted Sundays off, so the number of days in April and number of letters in the alphabet will come out even.  I'm using Sundays, however, to catch up on animals that "slipped through the cracks," as it were.

The Tiktaalik, or lobe-finned fish, may be the evolutionary link between fish and amphibians: ancestor, therefore, of all us land-dwelling chordates.  The front fins of the Tiktaalik were not your ordinary fins; they were designed to bear weight.  Moreover, they have wrist bones, and even structures resembling fingers.  Little holes behind the eyes suggest it had lungs as well as gills.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is the living incarnation of the "Darwin Fish," pictured on chromium bumper-stickers throughout the land.

Why it evolved the way it did, why anything evolved the way it did, was necessity.  In its specific environment, this remote ancestor of ours simply had to venture onto land or die.  We didn't leave the sea willingly; we were chased.

Q is for Quetzacoatl

Q is for Quetzacoatl.

Questzacoatl is the feathered serpent of Aztec mythology.  According to the story, he was not only God of the morning star, but the giver of books, and the one who introduced corn.

When I was a kid, I learned in school that Cortes pretty much rolled over the Aztecs like a steamroller through daffodils because Montezuma believed he was the returning god, Quetzaocoatl.  (Silly Aztecs!  Ha-ha!)  Turns out though, this may have been only propaganda from Cortes himself proving how gullible the natives were.  In reality, the Aztecs were not so easily fooled.  "You, Quetzacoatl?  You're nothing like Quetzacoatl.  For one thing, he's a snake.  For another thing, feathers."

Mormons believe Quetzacoatl was actually Jesus Christ, who according to their religion, visited the Americas after his resurrection.  Again, the Aztecs would be like, "Jesus, Quetzacoatl?  Jesus is nothing like Quetzaoatl.  For one thing, he's not a snake.  For another thing, feathers."

What Quetzacoatl clearly resembles to yours truly is a Chinese dragon.  What to make of that, however, I have no idea.

P is for Piranha

P is for Piranha.

Teddy Roosevelt visited the Amazon where the natives had rigged up a show for him.  They threw a bull into the river where piranha ripped it to shreds.  Teddy was mightily impressed and later wrote that the piranha was more vicious than the shark or barracuda.  What the natives didn't tell Teddy was they'd blocked off the river beforehand and been starving the piranhas for days.  Even guppies would get a little feisty in that predicament.

Nevertheless, a piranha is no guppy.  There have been numerous documented human attacks - some fatal - over the past few years, including groups of fifteen to one hundred bathers.  Adding up all the folks involved in piranha attacks since 2011, according to Wikipedia, I get the number 287.  Damn.  For shark attacks in the same period, again, using Wikipedia, I come up with 225.  Number of alligator attacks?  About 9.

Okay.  So piranha may not have been quite the monsters TR thought, but they're still pretty impressive.  And here's one final fact I find kind of creepy.  What makes piranha so formidable is they hunt in schools.  But they don't do that to make them more effective hunters, oh, no.  They do it because they're afraid.  They're protecting themselves from things that eat them.  So next time you're swimming in the Amazon, remember, it's not just the piranha you have to watch for, it's all the things that eat piranha.

O is for Opossum

O is for Opossum.

It is not the same as a possum, which is a marsupial native to Australia.  It is a marsupial, however, and the only marsupial in the Americas.  Opossums do have semi-prehensile tails, but not nearly prehensile enough to hang from a branch like they do in Disney movies.  They also do "play possum," and their act is much more convincing than you may have thought.  When hissing and baring its teeth don't do the trick, the opossum not only goes completely immobile - in a creepily realistic impression of rigor mortis - it excretes a green fluid from its anus that smells like rotting flesh.

Opossum is edible, if you're hungry enough, but bear in mind it will poop itself with green slime somewhere along the way.  According to the Joy of Cooking, the opossum should be caged for ten days and fed on milk and cereal.  Then it should be cleaned but not skinned; Joy of Cooking is very specific on this part.  Then put it in simmering water until the hair plucks out easily, and then scrape off the skin.

Hungry yet?

Remove the small red glands from under the legs and shoulder blades.  Parblanch for about twenty minutes, then roast as you would for rabbit.

On second thought, don't bother.

N is for Neanderthal

N is for Neanderthal.

Neanderthals dominated Europe for tens of thousands of years.  Then, about 60,000 years ago, when humans emerged from Africa, the Neanderthals began to die out, which scientists find mysterious.  (Hint: It has to do with humans emerging from Africa.)

Although there are traces of Neanderthal DNA among humans, the Neanderthal was not our ancestor but a whole nother species.  It would be nice to believe that humans overwhelmed them with superior brainpower, but the reality is we probably just had a much faster reproduction rate.  We weren't smarter, just hornier.

Contrary to what you might think, Neanderthals weren't hairy creatures that walked bent over and grunted at each other.  They stood upright, had a language, and used tools.  If you saw a Neanderthal walking by dressed in modern clothes, you would not notice anything particularly strange.

Neanderthals cared for their sick and buried their dead.  On the other hand, at least one scientist says they raped and killed humans and weren't above eating human flesh.  So all in all, they weren't all that different from us.

M is for Mule

M is for Mule.

When a daddy donkey, or jack, and a mommy horse, mare, love each other very, very much, God gives them a little baby mule to take care of.  A daddy horse, or stallion, can also love a mommy donkey, or jenny, very, very much, but God isn't nearly as likely to give them a baby if they do.  Even better, zebras sometimes love horses or donkeys, creating sporty mules called zedonks.  I am not making this up, so help me.

The mule, except in very rare instances, cannot have babies of its own.  It is considered as sturdy, sure-footed, and patient as a donkey, but as fast and strong as a horse.  Plus it never takes maternity leave, so it's pretty much a win-win unless you're a mule.  Basically a mule is an animal with absolutely no purpose in life but to do what humans tell it.

The reason mules are sterile is that a horse has 64 chromosomes and a donkey 62.  The mule compromises at 63 chromosomes which evidently is a bad number if you're looking for off-spring.  A zebra has between 32 and 36 chromosomes.  And since you're probably wondering, a human has 46, putting us closer to the zebra end of the spectrum than that horse.  I have no idea what horses are doing with all those extra chromosomes.

A male mule might be sterile, but it's not impotent, and a stud mule - there is such a thing - is notoriously mean, and have to be fixed.  The mules themselves do not feel they were broken in the first place.

L is for Lemming

L is for Lemming.

The lemming lives in the arctic tundra.  You probably already know that lemmings don't really commit mass suicide, but it sure looks that way.  They have a very high reproduction rate but at the same time are surrounded by animals who like to eat lemmings.  For these reasons, their population varies widely.  One moment, it's like, hey, where did all the lemmings go?  And the next, it's like, damn, enough with the lemmings already.

When lemmings get too numerous - and after all, how many lemmings do you really need anyway? - they set off for new places to live.  Some of these new places are on the other sides of bodies of water, such as rivers.  Fortunately, lemmings are excellent swimmers.  Well, some of them are excellent swimmers, some of them are only so-so.  Bottom line, the good swimmers make it, and the so-so swimmers don't.  This is the source of the mass suicide myth.  Bad thing is, if you're a lemming, you don't know what kind of swimmer you are until you jump in the river and give it a try.

That's pretty much a metaphor for life in general.

Bonus Letter: A is for Amoeba

A is for Amoeba.

Owing to the rules of the A-to-Z blogging challenge, I'm not required to post on Sundays; nevertheless, here's a bonus blog about my friend, the amoeba.

Even if you don't know a rotifer from a gastrotrich, you've heard of amoebas.  They are the rock-stars of protozoans.  The name amoeba means change, because their shape is so fluid.

Amoebas have a contractile vacuole, but that's kind of what you'd expect.  No surprises there.  Their genome has 290 billion base pairs, which contrasts to a measly 29 billion pairs in the human genome; it seems kind of insulting such a simple animal would have so much genetic information, but that's the way it is.  Amoebas eat by phagocytosis, which is a fancy way of saying the amoeba just engulfs its food, surrounds it.  Since the amoeba doesn't have a mouth, it's all mouth.  If a great big amoeba tries to hug you, watch out.

Scientists used to think amoebas had always produced asexually, but it turns out a long time ago, there were mommy amoebas and daddy amoebas, and when they loved each other very, very much, you got little baby amoebas.  After a few million years or so, however, the amoebas decided it just wasn't worth the effort and it made a lot more sense reproducing without getting into the whole, "You forgot our anniversary" and "do these vacuoles make my protist look fat?" thing.  What this means is, while we used to believe that sexual reproduction represented an advance over asexual, in fact, it's the other way around.  This news is disappointing to the rest of us who still view sex as at least mildly entertaining, but maybe when you've been on the planet as long as amoeba have, you start to see things differently.

K is for Kakapo

K is for Kakapo.

The Kakapo weighs nine pounds, fully grown, and is the world's only flightless parrot.  And I say thank goodness.  One thing we don't need is a bunch of nine-pound parrots flying overhead.  They have a sweet, floral smell, which is not something I associate with parrots I have known.

The few kakapos we have left live in New Zealand - there are only about 150 or so.  At night they come out - they are nocturnal - and root around for food.  This system worked very well for the kakapo until sailors started bringing over cats and rats which are also nocturnal and also root around for food at night and for whom a flightless, nine-pound parrot is a dream come true.

When kakapos mate, the males gather around making enticing displays - enticing to a kakapo - and the females choose their favorites for a quickie and then they never see each other again.  This sounds very sexy and daring, but think what they've ended up with.  Nine-pound flightless parrots that smell like flowers.  It probably didn't help matters that the females were making their selections at night.

One does not wish to blame the victim here, but we can't help but wonder how the kakapo managed to paint itself into such a corner, evolution-wise.  Like the dodo, it found itself in an isolated island without predators and just let itself go.  Then when the rats and cats showed up, it was a sitting duck, or sitting kakapo if you prefer.

Let that be a lesson to the rest of you.

J is for Jellyfish

J is for Jellyfish.

Back in the Cambrian, 700 million years ago, before there were even plants, back when the only things around were trilobites and anomalocarises, there were jellyfish.  All the arthropods were like, "You jellyfish are never going to make it, ha-ha, with your soft bodies.  Good luck."  But it turns out the jellyfish outlived them all.  Way to go, jellyfish.

When a mommy and daddy jellyfish love each other very, very much, the daddy releases sperm into the mommy's mouth, which is not considered kinky if you're a jellyfish, and pretty soon there are a bunch of baby polyps anchored to the ocean floor, their tentacles waving upward like adorable baby birds, only not so adorable and capable of stinging.  Several polyps may share a single stomach, and yet they never complain, unlike human offspring who can't even manage to share a bathroom.  When they mature, they float off into the water, and soon are full-grown jellyfish, or medusa, and the whole beautiful cycle begins again.

Along with there being boy and girl jellyfish, which I bet you didn't know, there are also jellyfish with eyes.  Do you find this as disturbing as I do?  The box jellyfish, which is among the most venomous species on earth, has up to twenty-four eyes, is capable of fast directional swimming, and can even form memories.  In other words, it can see you, chase you, and think about you.

I is for Indri

A French naturalist asked a Malagasy the name of that weird animal, and the Malagasy pointed and said, "Indri?" meaning, "there?" because there are lots of weird animals in Madagascar.  And that's how the indri got its name.

Alas, that story is about as true as the one where the elephant gets its trunk, but it's a good one, nevertheless.

The indri is a great big lemur and is also called babakoto, which means "ancestor" because somehow the Malagasies tumbled onto the notion they'd descended from lemur-like animals, which is pretty smart of the Malagasies.  According to the myth, there were two brothers, one of whom decided to climb down from the tree and try his hand at farming, while the other stayed put.  We're descended from the one who left the tree.  The loud songs of the indri, which can last up to three minutes, are the indri calling for their lost brother.

H is for Human

H is for Human.

Humans have relatively soft feet, prone to getting cut on rocks and sharp sticks.  The skin on the rest of their bodies is even softer, and they have neither fur nor body armor.  They walk upright which creates problems for a a spinal column evolved to support a quadruped.  Unlike, for example, a fly, which is able to care for itself from the time it hatches, humans have an absurdly long maturational period, often decades, before they can live on their own.  In spite of, or because of, being "social animals," they are belligerent and warlike, even at times, genocidal. 

And yet, they undeniably dominate planet earth.

This is as peculiar as if the King of the Beasts, instead of the Lion, turned out to be...  well, us.

Whether because of their large brains, their opposable thumbs, or their ability to verbalize, rather than adapting to suit their environment, humans adapt their environment to suit themselves.  Humans fly sitting down.  Humans eat salmon in the mountains.  Humans eat fresh strawberries in December.  They are warm in winter and cool in summer.  They freeze water for the purpose of putting it in water.  They feed and shelter other animals for the purpose of amusement or because they are pretty to look at.

Humans sometimes forget that, however remarkable, they are just another kind of animal.  Some humans deny it.  Did dinosaurs ever forget they were animals?  We will never know.

G is for Gerbil

G is for Gerbil.

There's not much to say for the gerbil, but the gerbil doesn't let this bother him.  Originally called the desert rat, but re-branded as gerbil for the American pet trade, the gerbil hails from Mongolia and was first brought to the US for research.  Instead of being bald, its tail is covered with stiff brown fur.  It is a rodent which means its teeth never stop growing and must be ground down to stay in trim.  In captivity, it will run on its exercise wheel until it gets up to speed, and then will stop and hang on, letting the wheel do a full 360 loop.  I do not know if other rodents do this, but gerbils do, for I have seen them do it.

I had gerbils as a child, and we would put on the album Hair at high speed and pretend they were giving us a lip-synching concert.  This last is not really zoological information, but it was amusing for a ten-year-old kid in Sandersville, Georgia in an age before internet.

Oops! Bonus Letter: B is for Bactrian Camel

B is for Bactrian Camel.

Sundays, according to the rules of the A to Z Blogging Challenge, I don't have to blog at all, this way the number of letters in the alphabet will match up with the number of blogs.  But I goofed.  Nancy and I are in New York, and I forgot what day it was, so I blogged F is for Fly.

Today, therefore, I'll backtrack and supply this picture and biography of one animal that fell through the cracks as it were.  This is the Bactrian, or two-humped camel.  It is so much cooler than the garden-variety one-humped or dromedary camel.  Someone once called a camel "a horse designed by committee."  Well, the bactrian camel is a camel designed by committee.

I did not include this in the original go-round because I was convinced that a two-humped camel was called a dromedary, but no, I had it wrong.  I owe this error to a poem by Ogden Nash or else possibly Stephen Leacock:

The camel has a single hump.
The dromedary, two.
Or is it the other way around?
I'm never sure, are you?

I should've known not to trust a poet, especially one who admits to his own ignorance.  Anyway.  The word dromedary, incidentally means "running."  I was not aware camels of any description do much running, but maybe when I wasn't looking, they were skipping around like billy-o.

Only a few bactrian camels are in the wild, but it's marvelous to think of any wild camels at all.  There are no wild dromedaries.

F is for Fly

F is for Fly.

When I was eight years old, I killed a fly in Ft Pierce, Florida.

If she had lived a full life and reproduced, and her children had lived full lives and reproduced, and so forth, and so on, there would now be about 10,000,000,000,000-000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 extra flies right now.

You're welcome.

Actually, there'd be a whole lot more than that, but there's only so many zeroes I'm willing to type to prove a point.

Flies live only about a month, if they're lucky, watch their weight, and get plenty of exercise, but in that month a female can lay 9,000 eggs.  The eggs hatch into maggots which would seem adorable if you were a mama fly, and they feast on something dead or rotting until they change into flies and the wonderful circle of life begins all over again.

The adult fly eats by regurgitating a little bit of stomach acid onto its food and sucking it up through a soda-straw-like mouth part.  This may explain why flies are such remarkably un-finicky eaters: everything they eat tastes like fly puke.

Flies are generally considered revolting, but they and their offspring eat a lot of nasty stuff which otherwise would be stacked up hip-deep before we knew it.  Ever notice how many squirrels and birds and chipmunks you see?  Bunches, right?  Bunches and bunches and bunches.  Well, how often have you seen one dead?  Oh, sure you see a dead animal from time to time, but think about this: every animal you've ever seen, plus every animal you've never seen, dies.  And yet, you only come across some poor critter's corpse once in a while.  Ever wonder why?  No, of course you don't, you thoughtless rapscallion, because if you did, you'd take a moment to be grateful for the relentless appetite and wondrous reproductive powers of... the fly.

E is for Electric Eel

E is for Electric Eel.

When I was little, I thought electric eels weren't real things, but something people just made up, like flying horses and cockapoos.  But it turns out they really do exist, and they really kill their prey with electricity, and if you touch one, it'll zap you.  They live in the Orinoco River Basin, which alongside Australia, must be one of the coolest places in the world, because that's where you'll also find piranha, fresh-water dolphins, and those army ants that can overrun your entire plantation like in that movie.

It's actually not an eel, but a knifefish, but that seems nit-picky because the main thing is, it's definitely electric.  It's not like an electric-blue tetra that really is a tetra, but gets its name just for its color.  Electric eel or electric knifefish, no matter how you slice it, is electric, but don't try slicing it because buzzz---zap! 

The electric eel has three pairs of organs that produce electricity: one is Hunter's Organ, the other is Sach's Organ, and the third is just called the main organ.  (You biologists out there, there's an entire organ waiting to be named after you.)  Like I said, the eels have three sets of these organs, which take up most of the body, and can produce a current of up to 500 watts.  The organs are modified nerve or muscle tissue, which conduct electro-chemical charges even in us, but electric eels take this to extremes.

Even so, the shock of an electric eel is not enough to kill a human, which I find strangely disappointing.  The electric eel is that last of its genus.  Its relatives, the knifefish, produce electric current for navigation and communication, but they're not as cool as the electric eel.  Wikipedia, which is the source of all information, lists the electric eel's conservation status as "least concern."  I'm not sure whether this means we have an ample population of electric eels or no one would be especially concerned if they died out.

D is for Dodo

D is for Dodo.

If you're not very smart, don't know how to hide, and are harmless and the least bit edible, the dodo is a good example of what will happen to you.

Dutch sailors marveled when they discovered the bird in 1589.  "They're completely unafraid of us!  What a bunch of simpletons!  I wonder if they're edible!"

They named the bird, Dodo, meaning "simpleton," or else possibly "fat ass," instead of say, Yummy-Bird, because although it was edible, it was nothing to write home about.  Perhaps if the dodo had been better tasting, it would be with us today.  Then we would have bred it.

The first recorded human encounter with the dodo is indicative of what would become of them later.  The sailors managed to corner a group of these and seized one by the foot, it made a "great noise" at which the other dodos "came running to its assistance."  What a bunch of flightless birds thought they could do against Dutch sailors molesting one of their friends is unclear, but these sorts of good intentions only get you in trouble, survival-of-the-species-wise.

Within a hundred years after their discovery, the dodo was extinct: prey to invasive species such as dogs, rats, and humans, and particularly zoologists, who were eager to get a taxidermied specimen of their own before supplies ran out.  Also, I forgot to mention, the dodo laid one egg at a time.  Really, it's remarkable they lasted as long as they did.  They must not have been very good-tasting.

Now other animals are discovering how dangerous humans are even if you are clever, a good hider, and bad to eat, but dodos were the first to go, making them the poster child for extinction.  Or at least they would be the poster child if we knew what they looked like.  The preserved specimens fell to pieces hundreds of years ago, and the drawings don't agree with each other.  The dodo is so dead, our collective memory of them is gone as well.  You can't get much more extinct than that.

C is for Cuttlefish

If you've ever seen a cuttlefish, it's only because he wanted you to see him.  Calling cuttlefish "chameleons of the sea," gives too much credit to chameleons.  Cuttlefish can look any way they want.  In seconds, they can render themselves invisible against any surface by changing not only the color and pattern, but texture of their skin.  This makes drawing one both easier and more difficult.  No one can accuse me of drawing it wrong, because no one, not even the cuttlefish, knows what they really look like.  If I make one blue with pink stripes, I can just say that's how this particular cuttlefish chose to look at the time.  If I'd wanted, I could've given it a big funny nose and Groucho Marx glasses.

Cuttlefish are perhaps the most intelligent marine animal.  If you know anything about Darwin, you'd know that anything that's a master of disguise and highly intelligent must be dee-licious.  Anything good-tasting that's stupid and doesn't know how to hide, gets eaten up.  Witness the dodo.

Cuttlefish have three hearts, which seems excessive in anything so small.  Their blood is blue and their pupils are shaped like little Ms.  They use jet propulsion and squirt ink.

When they mate, a male stands guard over his female to protect against unauthorized entry, but certain sly bachelor cuttlefish have found a way around this; they will make themselves look like a female cuttlefish and thus slip by unchallenged.  The male cuttlefish thinks, "Oh, that's just a female.  No harm in her.  The missus must be having some friends over."  Then once they've duped the husband, they reveal themselves to the female and make sweet, sweet cuttlefish love.

So you male cuttlefish out there, beware.  Even when a female gives her heart away, she still has two to spare.

B is for Brontosaurus

The Brontosaurus lived between 150 and 154 million years ago, one of the largest dinosaurs, yet gentle, inoffensive and plant-eating, with a long graceful neck.  Or at least it would have been these things, if it had ever existed.  There is no such thing as a brontosaurus.  There never was.

The brontosaurus was put together in 1877 by Yale Paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh who'd discovered the complete skeleton of an apatosaurus minus the skull.  Ever the resourceful one, Marsh simply stuck on a skull from an entirely different dinosaur.  He named his creation brontosaurus, or "thunder lizard."  Later Marsh came across an entire apatosaurus, this time with the skull intact.  The name he gave it means "deceptive lizard," which is pretty ironic.  He must've been thinking, "Say, this thing looks almost exactly like a brontosaurus, except for the h...  Uh-oh."

A is for Armadillo

The name Armadillo means "little armored one."  The Aztecs called them "turtle rabbits."  In the southeast, they are mockingly referred to as "possum on a half-shell."  Inspiring whimsical nicknames is their only known practical use.

Armadillos are shy, nocturnal, live in burrows, and eat worms and insects.  Armadillos are not attractive animals and in spite of having very poor eyesight, they seem to know it.  They do not share burrows, and when they mate, the female will delay impregnating herself for up to six months.  How this is possible, I can't explain, but ask yourself how quickly you'd want to get pregnant if you'd been inseminated by an armadillo.

Armadillos are also edible, but there is a high correlation between armadillo meat and leprosy. The methodology of this data, however, is rather slipshod.  We are left to wonder if eating armadillos causes leprosy, or if lepers just happen to eat a lot of armadillo.  There are insufficient numbers of lepers or armadillo-eaters for a really conclusive study, so the world's curiosity about this may go forever unsatisfied.

At any rate, there is no shortage of armadillos.  We have lots of those.  Although all species originated in South America, they are no longer confined there.  Not by a long shot.  They have been spotted as far north as Illinois.  One armadillo expert believes they may be traveling by train.  (This particular armadillo expert lives in Michigan, which is as far from Armadillo-Central as you can get, which ought to tell you something.)

The armadillo is the only surviving member of the Order of Cingulata, which sounds pretty impressive until you realize that the entire order basically consisted of different sizes of armadillos.  The smallest armadillo is the Pink Fairy Armadillo, which is not nearly as adorable as it sounds, and the largest was the now extinct glyptodont which was just another armadillo, except it was as big as a car.

One last fact about armadillos: when alarmed, they jump straight up into the air.  This means, if you drive over one, they may jump straight up into your engine.  Something you might want to keep in mind when driving at night.