Wikipediaposting: animal oddities
Over the past two years, I have been routinely doing the daily Metazooa phylogeny classification game with my lover. Sometimes it's been leading us to deep wikidives. This, coupled with my own rabbit holes and some shared by close ones, has provided me a sizeable amount of fun trivia and silly thoughts on a wide variety of animals.
I've long wanted to make a series of compilation posts to share some of those, in case you'd also be interested in the oddities and the sillies, and are into reading small excerpts of Wikipedia articles (embedded as I could; they probably work better on mobile than desktop). Of course, depending on where you live in the world, or your knowledge of animals, some of these facts may appear as perfectly normal to you.
Still, here's one of those posts to share my own joy and amazement.
Everything is shrimp
Soon everything will be named shrimp and look like a crab. The shrimpization of names and carcinization of body plans is on its way. You cannot stop it.
Totoro is a worm
More accurately, I suppose: the Catbus is actually a Wormbus.
But anyway now Totoro really is the name of a worm.
This is at least as good as naming a protein like Sonic the Hedgehog. Also this worm is cute somehow.
Legless lizards are a thing
There's little to comment here. I'm just amazed at how many kinds of legless lizards seem to exist, and that they exist in the first place. Look at this lil' guy. They're not a snake.
I'm a bit mindblown.
Mole/shrew madness
The true insectivores are wild. When you dig below the surface and the more commonly-known hedgehogs, moles and shrews, you'll find fascinating creatures like the fun solenodon with their venomous saliva(!!), the rodent-looking gymnure (also called moonrat or hairy hedgehog, which are wonderful names), and the long-nosed desman.
But if you dig a bit more on moles and shrews, you'll discover that this is where true chaos lies, because evolutionary convergence is not just about crabs. And so, "mole" and "shrew" are actually rather generic names, both also given to a bunch of mole-looking or shrew-looking animals which aren't technically any of those.
But what actually breaks me is this:
Where do the shrews end? Where do the moles begin?
I'll let you ponder that question and will leave you with this extraordinary elephant shrew. Which is not technically a shrew. It's just adorable.
