Animals You Have Never Heard Of But Need to See

My lovely little two-year-old daughter loves animals, as do all kids at that age. She does some kick-ass impressions of monkeys, dogs, cats, elephants, lions, tigers, dinosaurs (granted, the lion, tiger and dinosaur impressions all sound quite similar). And she has all sort of little puzzles and books showing all the animals that kids normally learn about, in this country at least.

It strikes me as interesting though, that the animals she gets exposed to are pretty much only from three continents: North America, Europe, and Africa. I suppose penguins often get in the mix too, and sometimes pandas. Australian animals get a page in your more comprehensive books. But it's still not enough for me, because there are so many awesome animals from the other fifteen or so continents (I don't have the exact number on me at the moment).

And I'm not talking about the bizarre little bugs who have 35 eyes on each leg and eat their own genitals or whatever. Bugs are fascinating to hear about, but are no fun to see in person, at least when it's not genital-eating season. I'm talking about the animals that are big enough to be fun to see in zoos.

Here are a few of my favorites:

Chevrotain

That's an adult chevrotain, also known as a "mouse-deer." They are from Southeast Asia. There's one at the the Minnesota Zoo, and it is the cutest thing you've ever seen -- way cuter than that picture. It makes the zoo's much more popular red panda look like a slime mold.

Chevrotains weigh at most 18 pounds and are in the suborder ruminantia, which also includes deer, giraffes, cows, antelopes and goats. They have barely evolved in the past 30 million years, and love the water, so some believe that whales evolved from chevrotains. No joke. Whales, as I hope you know, are mammals, not fish. Mammals evolved on land, so for whales to exist, some mammals had to move back into the water. Of course, the development from chevrotain to whale took millions of years and involved lots of embiggening (an evolutionary term meaning "getting more bigger.")

Capybara

Now we go from a tiny deer to a gigantic rodent:

The capybara's the one on the left. On the right is a species known as a "scientist," identifiable by the white beard, the cheap clothes, the baseball cap with a logo unrelated to any sports team, and the popsicles. (Scientists subsist entirely on popsicles and condescension towards anyone who isn't a scientist.)

I picked a picture that included a more familiar species so that you could get an idea of what really makes capybaras fascinating to see in person: how large they are. They are basically R.O.U.S.es (Rodents of Unusual Size). It is a bit jarring to come across something that looks like a beaver but weighs as much as an Olsen twin, what with capybara adults clocking in at an average of 100 pounds. Most live in South America, but I know they have some at the zoo in Amsterdam. So get on a plane right now, go to Amsterdam, look at the capybara for about 15 minutes, and then fly immediately back. (There's not much else to do in Amsterdam. Assuming that you love Jesus.)

If you're lucky, you'll be able to catch a capybara eating its own poop. Scientists call this "coprophagia," because scientists like to make up very long, difficult words for simple concepts, in an effort to keep science a secret. A lot of animals eat their poop, by the way, and not because they're stupid (though they are, at least compared to me. I am a scientist, by the way). They do it to restore a lot of the gut bacteria that they need to digest all the grass they eat. Ideally, that gut bacteria wouldn't leave with the rest of it in the first place, but, failing that, poop-eating is the Plan B.

It does beg the question, though, of whether poop-eating defeats the purpose of pooping. So you're trying to get rid of bad stuff, but when you do, you accidentally shed some good stuff. Then it's like, oh crap, I need that good stuff. So you eat it all back up. Then you have to get rid of the bad stuff again, and, oh man, who could have predicted, the good stuff left too. So then you have to eat it all again. I wonder if each capybara has only had one poop in their lives that keeps circulating in and out.

Maybe the good gut bacteria sits in a layer on top of the poop, like the icing on a cupcake, and the capybaras just eat that. More likely, they only need to eat a little poop to get enough gut bacteria back. Then on the aggregate they're able to come out ahead.

It is my moral obligation right now to point out that we humans apparently don't eat enough of our own poop. Scientists have recently discovered that injecting poop into people's buttholes (they of course call it "fecal bacteriotherapy" so no one will be interested in it) can cure C. diff infections, which can be very brutal. The good bacteria from the injected poop can then crowd out the virulent C. diff.

Modern life is of course to blame for the C. diff infections in the first place, because modern life is to blame for all our problems. Surprisingly, it's not video games that are at fault this time -- it's the fact that we've gotten away from the simple, small-town values of the old days, values like eating your own poop. When I was a young lad growing up in Mayberry, U.S.A., skippin' stones down by Old Mill Pond, dancin' the watusi at church hootenannies, and systematically oppressing Negroes, we didn't get our britches in a bunch just cuz a few turds showed up in our peach cobbler. Kids today, what with their MTV and lambada dancing and improved but still problematic race relations, just can't appreciate the simple pleasures of a good old-fashioned diarrhea soup, served with nothing but a little salt, a little pepper, a splash of urine, and a whole lot of love. (See "grumpy old man argument" in the previous post about arguments. I'm a bit obsessed with it, as I got a lot of it as a kid and I'm already seeing it crop up among my peers.)

Oh, and also, the antibiotics we take all too often have made the bad stuff even stronger in an effort to survive -- C. diff only started becoming a problem in 2000. These antibiotics may also flush out good bacteria we need for digestion, which perhaps causes some food allergies. But yeah, it's mainly about our society's shocking lack of poop-eating.

How did I get on this topic? Oh yeah, capybaras. Point is, they're real big and sometimes eat their own poop. Moving on ...

Mata-mata

Speaking of poop, the mata-mata looks like a 30-pound pile of it. It's often hard to tell what exactly you're looking at. You see a bumpy turtle shell, and in the picture you can make out an arm. That giant thing in the middle is its head and neck, and he's looking at you. He's actually giving you a come-hither look, and having just bought you a drink, he's expecting to get some action. I recommend you run.

But mata-matas don't look that way to charm the ladies. They look that way to blend in to the leaves and bark and other crap on the bottom of the Amazon. When they see a fish, they suddenly extend their long necks, open their huge mouths, and suck the down fish whole. It's quite a sight -- I saw it once at the Bell Museum in Minneapolis, where they have a huge mata-mata that sits right next to the glass, all the better to scare the crap out of you.

Man, this post is getting longer than I expected. It wouldn't have gotten so long if you all hadn't demanded so much jibber-jabber about poop-eating. We better move on to the next animal, which is ...

Pygmy slow loris

OK, that's a baby pygmy slow loris, so that's hardly fair. But look at that thing. It looks like a Precious Moments figurine, not an actual animal. It's as if it evolved extreme, almost sickening cuteness so that predators would stop and go "Awwwww. So cute! So cute I just don't want to just eat you up!"

And you don't have to go to Southeast Asia to see one -- they have a bunch of pygmy slow lorises at the Como Zoo in St. Paul (you know, it's starting to seem like the Twin Cities are a wonderful place to explore!) Here's what an adult pygmy slow loris looks like:

Adults typically weigh about a pound, so these are tiny little buggers. Lorises are primates, just like us, except that they're among the "prosimians," primates that are considered more "primitive," more like our distant ancestors.

It is not accurate, however, to say that lorises are monkeys. Primates are broken into prosimians and simians. Simians are broken into New World monkeys, Old World monkeys and apes. We are apes, not monkeys. Gorillas, orangutans, and chimpanzees are also NOT MONKEYS. I feel the need to BOLD that PART because my CAPS lock is MALFUNCTIONING, but it is APPROPRIATE because every damn time I go to the zoo, some stupid parents point at the gorillas and tell their kids to "look at the big monkeys." I then, of course, slap them in the face and scream "They're apes, dammit! Damn you! Damn you all to hell! You blew it up!" I then get forcibly escorted from the premises, and I scream "Get your filthy hands off me, you damn dirty ape!!! Because you are an ape, see, not a  monkey!!! See, you start with primates!!! And those are broken down into prosimians and simians!!!" By that point I usually am forcibly gagged, because the world isn't ready for the truth.

That's enough animals for now. The rest are all boring and delicious. The end.