Hippo's Wild World of Animals - Random Animal Facts

In one of our previous installments, I mentioned the Out-of-Asia hypothesis regarding an evolutionary cauldron on the Tibetan Plateau from which many species spread out. Our recent friend the painted lycaon and the closely related dhole are thought to be part of this faunal assemblage, and having its home range smack dab in the center of the cauldron the snow leopard is also ground zero for a lot of the elements of the theory.

The earliest fossils that appear to be definitively those of one of our modern group of big cats comes from this region, between 4-6 million years old. This is taken as some to be evidence that the Tibetan Plateau is the evolutionary cradle of the entire big cat lineage, with the snow leopard being the stay-at-home remnant of that lineage. However the morphological links between those fossil felids and the modern snow leopards are pretty tenuous. In general, the fact that the snow leopard (and other intermediate sized kitties like the awesome clouded leopard) are unable to either roar or purr is thought to be evidence that they are sort of intermediary forms between the small mewmewfaces and big mewmewfaces.

Snow leopards figure prominently in various legends and myths of the region. The famous 11th-century Tibetan poet and yogi Milarepa is said to have transformed into a snow leopard when he got lost, and so survived until his disciples could find him. In Nepal there are groups that believe that if you kill a snow leopard all of the sins of your past lives get transferred to your current life. Apparently this is considered a desirable thing to have happen, although I'm a little unclear on why. Beliefs like that certainly don't help conservation efforts.

There are also beliefs from parts of northern Pakistan that all snow leopards are female, while all otters are male. The male otters mate with female snow leopards, with the baby male otters going back to the water and the female snow leopards cubs heading into the mountains. So this page is essentially just porn for GumTurkeyles

That'd be my unemployed step-brother. I'm pretty sure his dad was a sloth.

This week's animal is the humble little hedgehog, as requested by songstarliner .

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So, with the ugly spectre of death hanging over all these small bequilled hedgecreatures, take in these pics!

I guess but this is what a porcupine looks like:


Nothing like a hedgehog, about as similar as a echidna is.

Like a spiky capybara.

Try harder, damn it! Go out at night and look for them.

Dead on its back with its legs in the air on the side of a road is an Armadillo in its natural habitat.

i remember reading in nat'l geo. that they actually jump straight up when startled, which contributes to their impact, often with the underside of trucks, either knocking them out to be hit subsequently, or killed on 1st impact.

Hedgehogs are surprisingly susceptible to death.

Oh, well armadillmoi's got thicker skin 

Want me to do a thing on shrews, Desert Dweller?

Out of curiosity I just did a Google search for pictures of shrews, and what got returned were about 50% elephant shrews - which are actually a totally different Order, more closely related to elephants & hyrax than true shrews.

Some have proposed the name "sengi" for the elephant shrews, in a vain attempt to avoid this confusion.  Sengi deserve to be better known, as some of them are unbearably cute:

Yes, and he's happy to see you.