Origins of the Pekingese: A Love Story

Ah, the Pekingese.

Photo source: Petfinder.com

The ancient toy dog breed beloved of the Chinese Imperial court. Whence came its flat face and bow-legged gait, characteristics of the breed for over 2,000 years? According to legend,

A lion and a marmoset fell in love. But the lion was too large. The lion went to the Buddha and told him of his woes. The Buddha allowed the lion to shrink down to the size of the marmoset. And the Pekingese was the result.

Photos courtesy of My Opera and the Amazona Zoo

Photo source: Good Dog Care

A less common version of the story substitutes a butterfly for the marmoset, but I think the family resemblance is more obvious in the marmoset version.

Happy World Tapir Day!

Every year, April 27th is World Tapir Day, dedicated to raising awareness of one of the most wonderful non-conventionally-attractive mammals in the world. This photo is a Baird's tapir, my favorite, which lives in Mexico and Central America. (Well, this particular one lives in New Jersey, but you get the point.) There are three (possibly four) other species, all from the New World except for the Malayan tapir, the black and white one that you are probably familiar with, if you're at all familiar with tapirs.

If you're not familiar with tapirs, of course, you're probably bewildered. People often guess that they are anteaters or some kind of pig. In fact their closest relatives are horses and rhinos, but aren't they so much more wonderful?

You can find out if your local zoo is having an event at the World Tapir Day Facebook page. Elsewhere on the web, you can find a ton of information (and an excellent gift shop) here. You might also like this webcam where you can sometimes see some Brazilian tapirs snoozing.

Celebrate!
- Wombat (No Relation)

Please consider breath mints

Few of us on a relaxing tropical vacation expect to be confronted by the leftover lunch, fat and shiny tongue, and ultra-hairy underlip of a towering pachyderm. While standing under this truly enormous animal, it was hard not to imagine that this gaping maw could be my last earthly sight. Luckily, this elephant was a friendly sort, perhaps because I was feeding her carrots. Elephants at the Taman Safari near Jakarta, Indonesia, are trained to accept food placed directly into their mouths, rather than picking it up with their trunks, for the entertainment and momentary shock of tourists.


As an elephant enthusiast and regular reader of elephant news, I had despaired of ever seeing these majestic creatures featured on this blog. It just goes to show that beauty is very hard to maintain from all angles.

Bonus: an aggressive zebra in the drive-through part of the safari demands carrots as well.

The Adorable Water Deer

No, I didn't mess up and post this on the wrong blog. The water deer, Hydropotes inermis, is quite deserving of a place here. It lives in China and Korea, in swampy regions and grasslands, where it follows a normal, deerish vegetarian lifestyle.

It also has three inch fangs.

Unfortunately for your nightmares, that is not a Photoshop, just a picture of a healthy male deer. Those giant teeth are used during mating season, when male deer fight each other for females' affections.

Now, try and imagine what Bambi would have been like with one of these starring.

Not trusting deer anymore,

tkrausse

Pictures courtesy of Wikipedia and Cracked.com (NSFW/18+)

Your Monday ugdorable

It's another baby aardvark! Coming right at you! From the Detroit Zoo! Thanks again to Zooborns!

Overexcitedly!,
-Wombat (No Relation)

Your Monday ugdorable

It's a baby aardvark! It's naked and wrinkly! It has a long snout with a piggy nose on the end! It has ears too big for its head! It's thin at one end, much much thicker in the middle, and thin again at the far end!

From the Colchester Zoo thanks to Zooborns.

Squealing,
-Wombat (No Relation)

Ugly communication

Remember our old friend the streaked tenrec? Tenrecs are a family of insectivores that occur only on Madagascar, where they've evolved to fill all sorts of ecological niches and developed into forms that look like all those other insectivores that are absent from the island. So you get tenrecs that look like hedgehogs, shrews, and, as in the case of this species, a scrub brush having a bad hair day.

The streaked tenrec has a very special feature of its own, though. It can make a sound by rubbing its quills together. In this picture you can see the special quills it uses for this purpose:



Making a sound by rubbing body parts together, called "stridulation," is familiar in creatures such as crickets. But apparently it had never been filmed in a mammal before, and now, in this clip from the BBC, you can not only hear it, but see it close up, and I have to say, it is actually kind of creepy. Go check it out.

-Wombat (No Relation)

Your Monday ugdorable

It's a baby echidna!

Unlike its cousins the long-beaked echidnas,the short-beaked species is in decent shape conservation-wise. But that doesn't mean that individuals aren't subject to both man-made and natural peril. This baby is in a wildlife rehab center because its mother was injured. Others are in trouble due to the recent massive floods in Australia.

Check out some more stories and photos of rescued echidna babies here (and for some less family-friendly information on echidnas, check out today's entry on my other blog.)

Ugly goes viral

Surely you've already heard about Heidi, the opossum in a German zoo who's become famous on the internet by being even uglier than a normal opossum. Maybe you read this article at the Christian Science Monitor, or Heidi's Wikipedia page, or this fan website that has sprung up to collect information on her. Or, you could go to her Facebook page or the website of the Leipzig Zoo, where Heidi resides. I can't think of much to add to that, but we couldn't let this phenomenon go without noting it here.

Jumping on the bandwagon,
-Wombat (No Relation)

Latrine Diving

Imagine hurrying over to the latrines to relieve yourself and looking down to see this face looking back at you. You might, if you lived in Peru.

Two-toed sloths in Peru have begun a recent trend of scampering (can sloths even scamper?) into latrines to eat human waste. Why, you ask? That's a good question, and surprisingly, there are several possible answers. Our feces (or at least, Peruvian feces) might have nutritional value. Maybe it's the insect larvae crawling around on the feces. Or maybe it's all the salt in the urine. Researcher don't know for sure.

(photos by M. Stojan-Dolar via Tetrapod Zoology)

Regardless of the reason, suffice it to say that were my latrines susceptible to sloth invasions, I'd probably develop a bad case of constipation. And yes, the sloth in the bottom picture is carting along a youngin' clinging to it's belly. Little sloths might want to develop the companion behavior to latrine diving of riding on mom's back.

I apologize if you happened upon this post while eating. Thanks for the article, Laura.

Scaly baby ugly!

Is that a dinosaur? A walking pine cone? Some kind of lizard? No, that's a mom and baby pangolin at the Taipei Zoo.

Pangolins have got to be one of the best ugly mammals ever. If you're looking for any kind of conventional beauty, you won't find it here. They start at a pointy little heads, get much fatter in the middle, and end with a long scaly tail. Yes, they're completely covered with scales! No other mammal can boast of that. Here's a better view of one:


And here's an angle on this ground-dwelling, digging creature that you won't see often:


In fact, there's not much chance of seeing a pangolin from any angle - they're noctural and not kept in very many zoos. Pangolins are sometimes called scaly anteaters and used to be classified with my favorite order, the Xenarthra, which includes sloths, anteaters, and armadillos. They have some similarities, such as the long anteater-like tongue, but they're now considered to be in their own family.

The scales are made of keratin, same as your hair and nails. Fortunately for the mom, the baby's scales are soft to start and only harden after they are born.

-Wombat (No Relation)

Thanks for the baby tip to Zooborns, and for the other pictures to Flickr user shakingwave.

Echidna on the Edge

What's the Internet for, if not lists of things? But I am not sure this one should be announced with that cheerful exclamation point:

The new EDGE mammals list has arrived! Latest research reveals a staggering 49 new species on the EDGE of Existence.

The Zoological Society of London's EDGE program identifies the world’s most Evolutionarily Distinct and Globally Endangered species, including "some of the weirdest and most wonderful species on the planet." Which is just up our alley on this blog, and the best one on this list has to be the Attenborough's long-beaked echidna.

Any echidna is a pretty rare creature, seeing as it's an egg-laying mammal. But this species is especially so. It was considered extinct until evidence of its existence was found on an expedition in 2007. Reports from that expedition were not 100% encouraging, however:

One of the world's rarest creatures, Attenborough's long-beaked echidna, appears to be alive and well, conservationists say. It is also reportedly quite delicious.

Thought to live on just one mountain peak in Indonesia, the locals say it's "very greasy and extremely tasty," and have a tradition of sharing one with enemies to restore peace. They didn't know it was unique to their area, and it's hoped that learning this will encourage them to conserve it.

It's hard not to have mixed feelings about this EDGE business. I love to be introduced to a weird animal I never knew existed but it sure would be nice if sometimes it was because of good news, you know?

Ambivalently,
-Wombat (No Relation)

Photo, of a different species of long-beaked echidna from Papau New Guinea, from the Guardian (The one on the list is so rare, no one's gotten a picture of it.)

Rodent hitting the snooze button

Normally, I wouldn't put a capybara on this blog, as I think they are the most beautiful of animals. But on a Monday, it's sort of reassuring for all of us mere mortals that even Caplin Rous, the World's Most Famous Capybara, doesn't look his best first thing in the morning.

Sleepily,
-Wombat (No Relation)

Follow Caplin on Twitter, be his fan on Facebook, and read his blog at the link above.

Your Weekend Antelope Snouts

I could say that I posted this picture because of the important news that an international conservation treaty has been signed to preserve the saiga antelope, which is threatened both by demand from the market for traditional medicine, and by a disease that killed about 12,000 of them in Kazakhstan earlier this year.

But really, it's just an excuse. This blog can't have too many pictures of saiga antelope, don't you think?

Snoutily,
-Wombat (No Relation)

Photo from The Guardian's Week in Wildlife.

Gazelle takes bold fashion step forward?

If you've never seen anything like this antelope before, you're not alone. No one else had either, before photographer Paolo Torchio captured a series of pictures of a uniquely hairy Thompson's gazelle in Kenya.

Experts have suggested that perhaps this little guy has some kind of disease that causes the excessive hair growth. But I'm not so sure. Take a look at this picture of your average Thompson's gazelle:



Boring, right? Does the world really need more pretty, graceful animals like this? If you were a teenage Thompson's gazelle, wouldn't you try to be different, too?

-Rebelliously,
Wombat (No Relation)

Photo of conformist gazelle by Flickr user Colin Jackson.

Zzzzzzz

Southern Elephant Seal on the Falklands Islands, thanks to The Guardian. With male elephant seals being from 14-16 feet long and weighing from 3000-5000 pounds, if this guy wants to sleep in on a Monday morning, I think no one better argue with him.

Sleepily,
-Wombat (No Relation)

Ugly is more than skin deep

The naked mole rat has been the subject of a number of posts on this blog. (Here is one nice one.) This is only proper, since there's nothing about the critter that isn't ugly, from the tip of its gross hairless tail through its misshapen wrinkled body to its buck teeth that are visible even when its mouth is completely closed.

But if you think "poor naked mole rat, if it only had fur, it would be cute," you haven't met the Damaraland mole rat. This less well-known cousin of the naked guys is completely covered with fur, but as you can see, that doesn't make a bit of difference when you've still got tiny pinprick eyes, two holes for a nose, and those same horrible buck teeth.

What's more, it's got the ugliest attitude of just about any animal I've ever met. What you see in the photos above is a colony of Damaraland mole rats in captivity thirsting after the blood of their keeper. Naked mole rats are as weak and inoffensive as they come, but Damaraland mole rats bite first and they don't ask questions later, either. All they do is bite every chance they've got. HARD.

According to the IUCN, the Damaraland mole rat is not endangered, and conservationists don't see any imminent risk to it, so its status is "Least Concern." I can go along with that. Worry about some other species - this animal can obviously take care of itself!

With painful memories,
Wombat (No Relation)

Read more about both kinds of mole rats here. Or don't; it might just encourage them.

Your Monday ugdorable

A baby long-eared bat at a wildlife rescue in Somerset, England, thanks to our friends at the Telegraph's Pictures of the Day.

Selected for your amazement and wonder by Wombat (No Relation).

All kingdoms, phyla, classes and orders welcome

I woke up this morning hearing the ugly mammals calling: "What about us?"


I feel guilty for posting about sea creatures twice a row. It's just too easy. I could probably post a picture of some astonishingly ugly aquatic animal every day without breaking a sweat.

But that wouldn't be fair. The farther an animal gets from furry and cuddly, the easier it is for them to be ugly. It's probably an instinctive reaction - the more different things are from us, the more likely we are to find them ugly.

So fish and invertebrates have a big head start. Mammals have to work so much harder to be ugly, since they start with the disadvantage of being warm, four-limbed, and at least somewhat furry.

But when they make the effort, they really can pull out all the stops, like the saiga antelope above, and this lovely rhino:



Mammals tend to dominate my other blog with their bad behavior, but they equally deserve to be honored here for their bad looks - and just as often as our squishy, scaly, cold-blooded friends.

Thanks to the Guardian UK and their fantastic weekly photo galleries for helping us recognize the efforts of the rhino and saiga antelope.

In solidarity with the homeothermic ugly,
-Wombat (No Relation)

Lift a glass to the ugly

Pull up a chair and welcome to my ugly beer party!


OK, actually those bottles are empty. They're part of my collection of beers with ugly animals on the label. I'm sorry to report that apparently you can no longer buy this wonderful homage to the elephant seal:



But despair not. We've got a warthog, and if you're not a drinker, you can buy a t-shirt of this one instead:


The very best, though, has to be this fantastic wolf eel:

(You can get a t-shirt of that one too, but it's a different, colorful version.)

Doing research for this post, I stumbled across another one that I don't have that I really need: Ugly Pug Black Lager! If anyone happens to see this in the Washington, DC area, please drop me a line.

Cheers,
Wombat