Nerd Animal Thread (Animal Facts you Know and Love)

[Tavros'sTauros]

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The Pangolin, also known as the scaly anteater, are covered with keratin scales as armor which are soft as a baby and hardens as it matures, weighing about 20% of their body weight.
The name is derived from the Malay word pengguling which means 'something that rolls up', while its Mandarin name Chuanshanjia translates roughly into "mountain-burrowing armored creature".
Pictured is a baby Chinese Pangolin, which are born one at a time. This particular species along with the Sunda Pangolin are currently critically endangered.

It also resembles a sandslash :O

 

[Sarcastrophe]

Enter the axolotl, an aquatic salamander native to some lake in Mexico. They have the ability to easily regenerate their own body parts (this is called neoteny.) However, they are currently endangered in nature. Their only remaining natural habitat is in Lake Xochimilco in Mexico; the axolotl population in the lake has been decreasing rapidly because of the introduction of the African karp to the lake.

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Hi Mudkip. <3

 

[Tavros'sTauros]

Hi Mudkip. <3

it's certainly a wooper, silly <3

 

[Tazonite]

Did you know that Echidnas lay eggs, meaning that Platypi aren't the only mammals which can lay Eggs.

Yes, I did. Some idiots don't however.

The Thylacine, a now extinct marsupial. You probably know it as the Tasmanian Tiger. They were the mammal that could open their jaws the widest. Also, I love them so much. <3 Favorite animal... if it wasn't dead. xD

You stole my animal. But you were super vague about it, so I'm gonna recycle this animal and use it for my own.

The thylacine was once an animal that was much more widespread than they were toward the beginning of the twentieth century. Known as the Tasmanian tiger by most for some reason, the thylacine has become my favorite animal just because of how it has a history. A tragic tale that ended in tragedy. How did the thylacines die? By European settlers of course. European settlers are bad news for anything and everything, as they have ruined lots of stuff in history- more than I care to count. They're what screwed over the native Americans, they're what screwed over the dodo, and they screwed over the thylacine too.

In about the 1900s, thylacines were blamed for the loss of livestock due to being carnivores. This resulted in bounties being placed on them and the thylacines were placed on a timer. Bounties didn't stop until a while later, and it was too late by the time the thylacine was put on protected status. The last known specimen was nicknamed Benjamin, and died in the Hobart Zoo in Tasmania due to neglect on September 7th, 1936.

There are some sightings of thylacines, however, none have been confirmed and they appear to be less and less as time goes on. They've almost been extinct for almost eighty years now. It is most likely that they relocated themselves to Southern Tasmania, where there are little to no people at all. Some searches have been set, but there has been no luck in finding the species.

However, there is a project still undergoing that is attempting to clone the thylacine, though if they fuck it up, the thylacine may end up being gone forever. The closest living relatives of thylacine- which could function as surrogates- are the numbat and the Tasmanian devil. The thylacine was once the largest carnivorous marsupial in Australia, since thylacoleo, the marsupial lion, was kinda extinct at that moment.

Thylacines did have one of the widest, if not the widest, gapes of any mammal, at around 165.86 degrees. They were the only Australian mammals with five toes on their front paws. Some say it's possible that the thylacine may have been able to walk upright like kangaroos. I can't see that happening considering the pictures we have, but who knows...? They were also marsupials where both genders had pouches. Females used it to carry offspring and males had them to... protect their male bits, I suppose. Thylacines also appear on the Coat of Arms of Tasmania.

I wish these animals were still around today. Very interesting creatures. It's a shame we didn't care enough to stop it from diminishing, but shit happens like that, I suppose.

 

[mfhoundoom]

Pigs are one of the few domesticated animals that will revert back to its wild state when they are released into the wild, as in they'll grow tusks and more hair.
About 50% of Jaguars will dig out maca roots to chew on them and experience an intense psychedelic trip.
Black Lemurs will pick up and shake poisonous millipedes which in turn will roll up and release a toxin which they rub all over themselves as an insect repellent as well as consuming the toxins to get super high.
Wanna know how reindeer really fly? They feast on psilocybin mushrooms.
Bighorn sheep suck on narcotic lichen with no non-recreational benefits.
C'mon guys everyone's doing it, just be cool.
Dinosaurs were extinct until an eccentric theme park designer figured out a way of cloning them from blood samples found in mosquitoes preserved in amber. Mayhem was only prevented due to the efforts of a handsome and muscular mathematician.

 

[Chou Toshio]

So, I have no fact, but I have a question.

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If Salmon both hatch and breed in streams, and always return to the same stream they were born to in order to spawn and die-- how do Salmon share genes across salmon populations?

No doubt salmon encounter other salmon from different streams many times while out in the open ocean, but fish don't breed in the ocean. They only spawn when they get back to the stream-- the one they were born in, along with all the other fish that came there to breed after also hatching in the same place, in the same time. So not only would it seem that not only would there be very little sharing of genes across different streams, but there would be no sharing across generation intervals.

How do these fish maintain genetic diversity?
How do they not end up breaking off into several completely independent species?