Hippo's Wild World of Animals - Random Animal Facts

When does your current list finish by, Hippo?

Mid to late September.

Look at that face.  Life is confusing and hard!  It doesn't have all the answers!  It's just trying to do its best!


Here's the Indian giant squirrel you mentioned.




Do we know what squirrel-chipmunk relations are like if they exist?

They don't really exist, both do things on land and in trees but chipmunks are burrowers so there's a bit of delineation. Following on from moimoi 's related question, their paths don't often cross, they can be in similar places after similar foods but because of their living arrangements, it's not such a big deal as there's usually enough food to make sure they don't really come into conflict.

silly buns - indeed! The Giant Indian squirrel is as colorful as his homeland

Those brushy ears are EVERYTHING!

I was thinking "hey, where's haysoos and his fossil based facts and more recent anecdotes?" just a minute ago too!

Off we go this week to go visit the giant tortoises of the Galapagos, as requested by songstarliner .

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There were three different lineages of giant tortoises, restricted to different island chains.

The Galapagos tortoises, descendants of smaller tortoises from South America are still found on islands off the coast of Equador.

The Aldabaran giant tortoise is today found only on the island atoll of Aldabara in the Indian Ocean, but there were tortoises throughout the Seychelles. These are likely descendants of tortoises from Madagascar (which had its own giant tortoise until about the 13th century).

The third lineage, the Mascarenes giant tortoises consisted of at least five species on the islands of Mauritius, Rodrigues, and Reunion. Sharp eyed viewers may recognize these as the same islands as the dodo once frequented, and they went extinct at about the same time (1730s) for the same reasons. The Mascarenes tortoises were unusual in that in the absence of predators, their shells became very thin - only about 1 mm thick.

There were other giant tortoises as well, scattered about through the geologic record. There's a giant tortoise from Florida found in a sinkhole with a spear right through it dated at about 12,000 years old. There were also huge tortoises in California, and a species known as Titanochelon that lived in western Europe and into Asia between 20 and 2 million years ago that was up to 7 feet long.

Meiolania, a horned tortoise with thorn-like spikes on its tail lived in Australia and nearby islands from about 25 million years ago until the last population was likely hunted to extinction about 2000 years ago on New Caledonia. They were up to 8 feet long, and probably weighed about a ton. It had a smaller relative (only about 500 lbs) named Ninjemys, named after the teenaged heroes on a half-shell of American mythology.

Of similar size to Meiolania was Megalochelys atlas, which roamed from Pakistan down through Indonesia to Timor between about 15 million years to 2 million years ago. At least humans probably didn't have anything to do with that extinction.

My first thought upon seeing this entry:

 ...and now my day is made 

The systematic and phylogenetic relationships of aardvarks have long puzzled biologists. Until the advent of modern genetic analysis, the only thing they had to go on was anatomical similarities between different groups, and in mammals this generally means teeth. Lots and lots of looking at the cusps, bumps, crests, hypoconulids, folds, creases, spacing and numbers of teeth. Then comparing them with fossil teeth. This becomes very difficult in mammals that through evolutionary specialization have lost their teeth.

Aardvarks aren't completely toothless, but their teeth are few in number, and modified into weird tubes of hard enamel with ribbons of dentene - unlike anything in any other mammal group. Originally, this led to them being lumped with the South American anteaters and the pangolins into a group known as the Edentates, despite obvious problems with biogeography and even post-cranial skeletal anatomy. That grouping is now known as being totally erroneous, but few alternatives have really been satisfying either. They were stuck with the elephants and hyrax for a while, on the basis that they were all kinda primitive (plesiomorphic), but that didn't really mean anything other than each of the groups hadn't really changed much in a long, long time.

Today, molecular data suggests that they are within a group known as the Afrotheria. The Afrotheria also includes sengis (elephant-shrews), golden-moles, tenrecs (last seen in our discussion about hedgehogs), as well as elephants, hyrax and sirenians (eg. manatees). Where they fit into this group is still unclear.

The fossil aardvarks found to date don't really clear matters up much. They are not plentiful, and either have very similar teeth to the modern forms, or are completely missing their skulls or teeth.

The fossils themselves are pretty interesting though. They are found as far afield as France, Greece and Pakistan so it appears they were rather more widespread in the past. They first appear in the Miocene, about 23 million years ago - and this is also their period of greatest diversity and range.

There is even a fossil species very similar to an aardvark found on Madasgascar. Unfortunately, this is one of those that is missing its teeth, so it's really unclear about its phylogenetic affinity. It appears that it may actually be more closely related to the tenrecs found on the island, having developed aardvark characteristics through convergent evolution. Those tenrecs are a weird group.

In mythology, the Egyptian god of deserts, storms, violence, and disorder who killed Osiris and usurped his throne was often depicted with aardvark features until he became more donkey-headed in the Late Period. Cerebus the Aardvark, of the comic series Cerebus started out as a parody of sword-and-sorcery heroic fantasy, but became more serious over time. During its heyday, Cerebus was cited as inspirational by Alan Moore, and certainly influenced the development of the Teenaged Mutant Ninja Turtles. The later issues devolved into a weird anti-feminist platform for the unusual religious beliefs its author developed, but it remains very important in comics history.

I've often wondered, as one will, if whether during the Old Kingdom aardvarks were rather more common in Egypt than they are today.

There was a period of extreme drought, known as the 4.2 kya Event that occurred around 2200 BCE (or 4.2 thousand years ago).  It brought an end to the Old Kingdom of Egypt, the Akkadians, the Umm-An Nar of the Persian Gulf, the Longshan and other Neolithic cultures in China.  It's quite possible that during this period, aardvarks were extirpated from much of Egypt.

If so, then later sculptors working on depictions of Set may not have known what kind of critter they were trying to carve, and over time it kind of settled on "donkey" as their best guess as to what the heck that thing was.

Of course, I have no actual evidence or anything to support this hypothesis, but it would be interesting if it were true.

Seems a decent hypothesis to me.

I took a lot of classes about Ancient Egypt while I was in college. It wasn't related to my major whatsoever, but I found that culture and time period to be fascinating to study.

Sharks are among my favorite life-forms, Hippo—beautiful and fascinating. Many thanks for the pictures—I’ve been under a lot of stress lately and this helped make my evening.