#pachyderms

[antiqueanimals]

St. Nicholas: Volume 11, part 1. May, November, 1883 - April, 1884. Conducted by Mary Mapes Dodge. Illustration by J. M. Nugent.

Internet Archive

[parkarts]

Some distinct differences between mammoths and mastodons:

Woolly mammoth artistic reconstruction (left, Mammuthus primigenius) and american mastodon (right, Mammut americanum.)

Artwork by Dantheman9758

- Evolutionarily, mammoths and mastodons split from a shared ancestor about 25-28 million years ago. While they look similar visually, they also exhibited some differences.

- Both had holarctic distributions and went extinct around 10,000 to 11,000 years ago, signaling the end of the pleistocene. Interestingly, isolated island mammoth populations stuck around as late as 4,000 years ago. This means mammoths would have still been alive at the same time the Great Pyramid of Giza was being built.

- Mastodons adapted to a variety of environmental conditions, though preferring coniferous and deciduous forests. They could tolerate both freezing temperatures and sub-tropical conditions.

- Mammoths were adapted to colder, boreal landscapes such as the tundra and open plains. The did not tolerate sub-tropical conditions well.

- Mastodons were primarily browsers, their diets consisted of shrubs, twigs, barks, conifer needles, and leaves. They had sharp, pointed molars to help chew woody branches.

- Mammoths were primarily grazers, their diet consisted of grasses, sedges, mosses, and lichens. They had flattened molars to help grind the plant material.

- Mastodons were smaller and somewhat robust. They had relatively shorter limbs, and a flatter skull.

- Mammoths were larger. They had slightly longer limbs and a prominent “humped” skull.

- Mastodon tusks did not curve as dramatically.

- Mammoths had massive, curved tusks.

Photo by Daniel Mann — Difference between mastodon molar (left) and mammoth molar (right.)

Photos by Leonello Calvetti (mammoth, top) and Brian Boyle (mastodon, bottom.)

[daily-fun-animal-facts]

White Rhinos

When you see a White Rhino you may make the observation that they aren't particularly "white". That may be because the "white" in White Rhino probably comes from the Afrikaans word "weit" or wide, describing the rhinos square lip. The shape of the lip is an adaptation for the way they eat: all grazing, all the time.

White Rhinos walk with their heads down and their square lips close to the ground, eating many blades of grass at once.

[eonhyena]

Julius dealing with Pants issues again 🦏👖

[thegreenwolf]

For today's "working animals" Indian elephant Zooly Art Challenge prompt, I chose to depict a member of the Thai Elephant Orchestra. Created by Richard Lair of Thailand's National Elephant Institute and American neuroscientist Dave Soldier, the orchestra features several Indian elephants playing on extra-tough instruments like drums and marimbas. when the country banned logging in 1998, the elephants that had been used in that work couldn't just be returned to the wild as they had lived their lives in captivity*, so their people had to get creative in finding something for them to do. Some of the elephants ended up giving rides to tourists; others were provided paint and canvases to create their own artworks. And then there's the Thai Elephant Orchestra. Up to 16 elephants may be involved at a time. They're provided with their instruments and shown how to use them, and then the elephants take it from there. Other than the occasional instructed song, their music is all improvisational. And while some may see it as just another job, there's no doubt that some of the elephants are having extra fun with it! As Soldier wrote in one article, "Often the elephant will continue long after a human asks it to stop, causing consternation to the frantically gesticulating human, possibly delighting the elephant. One might imagine trying to tell a 10,000-pound animal to stop playing a drum when she doesn’t want to." * It's only been since about 2019 that there have been experiments in trying to release captive African and Indian elephants back to the wild. Because Indian elephants are often very highly trained and handled by humans from birth/very early age, they are not only habituated to humans but also lack many of the social and practical skills of their wild counterparts.  So soft releases are allowing caretakers and scientists to observe how well these captive elephants do in transitioning back to the wild. Ink pen and Copic markers.

[shutterandsentence]

So I was really excited about this round of critiques on my novel chapter. I thought maybe I had finally knocked it out of the park this time. Nope. Still lots of work to do. Guess I’d better work on growing that thick skin...oh well!  That’s the writing life!

Photo: Brookfield Zoo, Illinois

[uwmspeccoll]

World Elephant Day, August 12

For World Elephant Day we present these wood engravings from The Naturalist’s Library by the American naturalist Augustus A. Gould, published in New York by E. Kearny, in the 1850s. We both revere and exploit these magnificent entities, and World Elephant Day was established to bring light to the realities of elephant life and culture, and to preserve and protect the elephants of the world that have been designated as either “Vulnerable” (African elephants) or “Endangered” (Asian elephants).

This mid-19th-century textbook on the natural world opens its section on elephants with, “The human race excepted, the elephant is the most respectable of animals.” It goes on to describe the virtues, physical qualities, and behavior of elephants, but also spends considerable space discussing their usefulness to humans as beasts of burden, engines of warfare, and as objects of curiosity. Oddly, however, almost nothing is mentioned about the value of elephant ivory, which has devastating effects on elephant populations today. Still, then as today, elephants tend to be conceptualized in relationship to their usefulness to humans, and World Elephant Day is an opportunity to disabuse ourselves of this conceptualization.  All species of elephants face the real possibility of extinction in the next 20 years. Today is the day one can begin to think on this.

View more posts from The Naturalist’s Library.

View another World Elephant Day post.

[girlwiththealligatortattoo]

WELCOME to another week on this beautiful planet, largely so beautiful because beings like this African elephant exist. Please help protect them. From the series "Into Africa"