Bio-Art: Mermaids: The Body Found.

A while back, there was a huge controversy about how Animal Planet had gone from being an educational channel to more of an entertainment channel. This sentiment reached its peak with Mermaids: The Body Found, a pseudo-documentary (2012) that worked around making mermaids as realistic as possible. They did such a good job that people were fooled into believing it was real. So just how do you make such a realistic pseudo-documentary, anyways?

Here's a hint: start with facts. The documentary opens with mention of conspiracy theories, and how even conspiracy theories need evidence. In particular, it mentions two events: the "bloop," a mysterious noise heard on sonar, and whale beachings brought about by sonar testing. These are both real.Pseudo-science, you're doing it right.

Throughout the film, the narrator details how mermaids could have evolved from a humanlike ancestor, taking to the sea instead of staying on land. Now, marine mammals are not my forte, but in spite of much of the documentary being fake, I'm going to give Animal Planet the benefit of the doubt when it talks about marine mammal evolution. The stuff about whales coming from wolflike (!UNGULATE) ancestors is definitely true. Point is, I didn't see any obvious flaws like I did in Dragons: A Fantasy Made Real. If mermaids did indeed wind up being real, this is some pretty solid reasoning of how they could have evolved.

The documentary also mentions the Aquatic Ape Theory. This is a thing, not something made by Animal Planet. Due to having little hair, a certain balance of body fat, and requirements like iodine for healthy brain function, the theory posits that part of mankind's evolutionary history happened in a marine environment. Unfortunately, even a mere glance at the linked site will tell one that a lot of this stuff has been discredited. It was still used well in the documentary, so I'll give it the paragraph it deserves.

Suffice it to say, the mermaids look amazing. As if the tail was not enough, the creators also factored in brain composition, communication (with dolphins!), sensory adaptations for life in the deep sea, and other features that one would usually not think of on the average mermaid. The transition stages are also pretty believable, with ancestors sporting tails like pinniped fins at one point. Neat.

Granted, there is one huge flaw almost unrelated to the content: the pacing of this thing is awful. It's one thing if you're trying the "American Godzilla" approach of not letting us see the monster without us seeing the movie. It's another when you advertise "Mermaids: The Body Found" and the first hour or so of the 1 hour and 21 minutes deals with bits and pieces and random, apelike creatures that are not the body promised. The word "mermaid" does not even come up until like 50 minutes in. In my personal opinion, that's a little bit too late for something advertising mermaids. This is in-character for science, which would indeed be in denial about such a subject. At least Dragons showed us the body right out of the gate; the mermaid "body" is a mess when we see it. Talk about beating around the bush.

That said, it's still a great documentary, and I'd advise anyone interested in pseudo-science or mermaids to give it a look. It's not quite as good as Dragons: A Fantasy Made Real (which still has flaws), but in the same vein and an enjoyable, if uncanny, watch. The mermaids themselves look believable.  The people making it did a darn good job.  Check it out, and do as the documentary advises: continue to treat mermaids as mythical creatures, even if they are out there.

The Human Foot: an Ode to Unintelligent Design.

So, I've seen some people who think the human form is a thing of perfection. Indeed, a lot of people see the human form as beautiful. Most of the art done over the ages has been of humans. We happen to be the most powerful species on the planet right now. How could something actually be wrong?

My answer to them? Just look at the human foot.

Source.

The human foot is a marvel of inefficiency. Look at all those segments. Look at those too-flexible joints. There are exactly 26 bones and 33 joints in the human foot - by foot standards, that's a lot.  There is a reason humans are susceptible to sprained ankles, arch pains, and so on. We have not really evolved to walk as well as some things. Beauty is only on the surface; the human skeleton, including the foot, is a right mess- and proof that evolution is a thing.

For starters, humans are plantigrades - the slowest type of terrestrial movement aside from, oh, slugs. The other two common forms of tetrapod movement, digitigrade and unguligrade (paws and hooves, respectively) both have fewer digits and overall less surface area on the ground. The fewer digits you have on the ground, the faster you move. Ungulates walk on their nails; that is why a horse will always be faster than you. Period.

Kangaroos are pretty much the only fast-moving plantigrades in existence. Most of their movement consists of hopping instead of walking. Kangaroos have dealt with being semi-bipedal and plantigrade pretty well; look at the foot above and how similar it is to that of an ostrich, which is probably the most efficient bipedal foot in existence. That is how far behind we are compared to say, birds. Seriously, just look at a (digitigrade) T-Rex foot compared to our messy human foot:

Our feet are messed-up as they are for a reason. Great apes, our closest relatives, have feet very much like hands- meant for grasping, with all five digits in tact and flexible joints. This is not the ideal form for a terrestrial foot, let alone a bipedal foot. We like to think our hands and feet are sufficiently differentiated. In reality, they're not; there's a lot of arboreal ape hand-foot still left in there. Ow.

The reason it isn't gone? Foot fetishists. Or, rather, there was no reason for this horribly inefficient foot to leave. It wasn't really hindering our survival, just being a nuisance. If anything, there is positive sexual selection for feet that look the way they do right now. Especially in cultures where women are covered from the waist down, the ankles and feet are downright attractive. If this attraction was absent and we had, say, predators to flee from, rest assured the foot would be a more beautiful thing.

Creature Feature: Springtails.

By request of one of our readers, we began looking stuff up on insect evolution. It's not covered too often, so the request was more than welcome. This led to our discovery of the oldest insect in the world, Rhyniognathus hirsti.

Source.

Wait a sec. What is that? Not in this blog's usual WTF way, but really, that fossil's hard to see. 
So here's the next best thing: a living fossil of an insect called a springtail.

Boing!

Actually, we aren't even sure if springtails are insects. Some people think that they diverged from insects a while back, and thus deserve their own class (Entognatha). They have most of the right stuff- six legs, exoskeleton, etc. - but also have some traits that stick out. Unlike most insects, they never really metamorphose, and don't have external mouthparts. Also, as per the name, springtails possess a long structure in their rears (called a "furcula") that lets them jump. That last one doesn't keep them from being insects - it's just cool.

Springtails go way back. They go so far back that the first bug ever was first thought to be Rhyiella praecursor - a basal springtail. The same chert section with R. praecursor held the fossil first mentioned up above. This makes springtails among the first arthropods to ever walk on land. No wonder their taxonomy is confused.

Springtails may be creepy, but are they harmful? Yes and no. They are agricultural pests at worst, a title shared with many insects. They are, however, sensitive to herbicides and many other soil alterations. One springtail in particular is used as a model organism to test for potentially-toxic soil. See? They're not all bad.

If you wish to find springtails, well, this was an entry covering a whole class of bizarre little arthropods. Springtails are tiny, but can be found beneath leaves and in other humid places. As shown above, they are tiny, and frequently confused with fleas. They eat decaying matter and keep microoorganisms in check. Plus, they bounce; there's not much to hate, even though some people thing any creepy crawly is legitimately creepy.

Creature Feature: Gorgonopsids.

Oh, furries. Why is it that your fursonas, despite being so "varied," tend to loop back to felids, canids, raptors and dragons? If you really want to be intimidating and predatory, go for something so weird, yet close enough to a modern carnivore that it creates an 'Uncanny Valley' effect.

Uncanny Valley'd!

Like this thing. What the hell is this thing?

That menacing-looking beast is a gorgonopsid (family Gorgonopsidae). Like Dimetrodon, it was not a dinosaur, but a mammal-like reptile called a synapsid. Synapsids were the way, way ancient ancestors of every mammal known today. Gorgonopsids were one family of many mammal-like reptiles present throughout ancient history. Every single one of them looked like something out of a horror flick.

Even though the name "gorgonopsid" literally means "gorgon-eyed," with jaws like that, who cares about the eyes? Gorgons also had huge tusks (which is not usually acknowledged in most modern media); gorgonopsids have saber-teeth and long, sturdy jaws to work with them. Their sizes ranged from being dog-sized carnivores to bear-sized behemoths (e.g. Inostrancevia); regardless of how big they were, those jaws would have torn a nice chunk out of their prey. As stated in my Dimetrodon entry, differentiated teeth like this are usually a sign that a given skull is at least a proto-mammal.

Gorgonopsids were wiped out in the Permian-Triassic extinction. In case you do not know your history of the world, the Triassic period was the first chunk of the Mesozoic, featuring relatively small dinosaurs. Gorgonopsids went extinct before that; despite being in the 'prehistoric animal' category, they never met a dinosaur. These creatures never got to compete with the big dinosaurs that most people know and love (or even the little ones). 



Synapsids are often overlooked in the modern media, but gorgonopsids got a fair amount of screentime on the British television show Primeval. It looks like a neat show, to say the least. Past and future superpredators entering the present day and causing damage? Count us in.

One of these. Black with bright purple stripes. Nobody knows what skin covering this creature had, so feel free to go nuts with fur, skin, and scales. GOGOGO, furry community!

Next time: A bat? Sure. Why not?

Creature Feature: Colugo.

If you look around the world, you can find some pretty darn weird vampires. Some of the weirdest bloodsuckers come from Malaysia, Burma, Thailand, and other bizarre places with just as bizarre fauna. Seriously, Malaysia has some twisted bloodsuckers that are both WTF and terrifying at the same time.

That said, I could have sworn there was an Asian vampire of some sort based off of this:

 

No, that is not a bat or a lemur. The colugo is a category unto itself. There is still debate over whether these things are closer to primates or bats. There are only two species of colugo in the family Cynocephalidae (literally "dog-headed"), and they are both native to Southeast Asia.



Colugos are the most airworthy of all gliding mammals. Not only do they have skin between their hind and forelimbs, but the flap extends all the way to the tip of the tail, and their digits are webbed as well. Such a stretch of skin allows them to glide up to 70 meters (230 feet) with a minimal loss of height. This arrangement does, however, make them clumsy climbers.


They also look sort of like the bastard children of a frog and a squirrel, but let's not go there.

Colugos have a number of other, odder traits. Their babies are born almost like marsupial babies; there is a bunch of crazy stuff about their dentition that makes mammal fanboys go nuts (their incisors have two root canals and a bunch of 'combed' ridges); they have camouflage that puts some moths to shame. The list goes on; no wonder these creatures have a category all their own.

Alas, because colugos are rare, nocturnal creatures, we do not know that much about them. They are threatened by habitat loss. As a creature highly adapted to gliding from tree to tree, if the Asian forests die, so will a valuable piece of evolutionary history.

Anatomy: You're Doin' It Wrong, Furries.

Alas...I do not have a better place to put something like this. I do not have a "furry blog" in which I jot down all my zoophilic thoughts. (Note that there IS a difference between the two...I just happen to have it really, REALLY bad.) This still needs to be said, as it is relevant to ALL fantasy art. Even if it is fantasy, it has to have some basis in realism or it does not work.

Often, in transformation art, artists will either fuse digits or do something else to which my inner biologist says "no, just NO." Ignoring that this IS fantasy artwork I am talking about here, there are some people who just do not get the anatomy of humans, animals, or both. Below are the most common mistakes on my list of things that piss me off in fantasy art.

1. A paw is a hand. A fin is a hand. A wing is a hand. A hoof is a hand. 

Look at your hand. Now imagine that everything else with skeletal limbs once had the same five digits.



All tetrapods - that is, all things with a bony skeleton and four limbs that are not fish - have a basic set of five possible digits attached to each of their limbs. These are numbered (by scientists, obviously) 1-5, with the thumb being #1.


Larger version here.

Breaking this one is somewhat understandable on horse transformations. After all, they only have one thickened digit on every foot. This is the pointer finger on humans, digit #3 or whatever else you would like to call the centermost digit on your hand.

The hoof is still another matter; if you look at the comparison between a simian hand and a horse's leg in the mammals-only image above, you will notice that one bone called the "cannon bone" is significantly longer on horses than it is in primates. This bone is what makes horses and other ungulates able to support themselves as they walk on their fingertips. Some people take shortcuts and not only fuse the whole human hand into one hoof, but also forget that the hand is longer and more slender on horses than on humans.

On artiodactyls - that is, even-toed ungulates such as cows, pigs, sheep, and, when in season, reindeer - there should really be no excuses for digit fusion. Those animals have two hooves (digits three and four) and two vestigial digits for a grand total of four digits on each foot. They are only lacking thumbs (digit 1 on the diagram).  Again, the cannon bone is also a LOT longer in these ungulates than in primates. Hoofed animals do not walk on their toes; they walk on their toenails.


This was actually from a rather neat article about turtle shoulder bones.

This numeric rule is not just true for mammals. It is true for all things that fall under the big "tetrapod" umbrella. Since very few furries have an attraction to invertebrates, this covers the vast majority of furry work. It would do other fantasy artists good to keep this in mind as well. There is a similar issue with hindlimbs, bearing the same anatomy in mind.

2. Snakes are not all tail. 

As a reptile fanatic, drakaina fangirl, and general biology nerd, nothing cheeses me off more than leg fusion in a serpentine transformation. (For one thing, fused limbs in humans is nothing short of gross - see my sirenomelia entry for details.)

No. No, no, no. A THOUSAND TIMES NO. Snakes have legs and tails just like lizards do. Here, I'll show you:

 

 


Those are vestigial legs on that python. They are attached to a tiny pelvis and everything. The vestigial legs in boids (boas and pythons) mark where the body ends and the tail begins. Snakes have short tails relative to their very, very long bodies.

(The image above is of a colubrid; no spurs, but the rest holds true.) 

The remaining spurs are used primarily in mating; they can hurt almost as much as a cat scratch, and some snakes (mostly boids) have excellent control over them. They are usually longer in males than in females, and, in some species, the female lacks these diminished limbs entirely. (For those curious, the rosy boa (Lichanura trivirgata) is one of them, making rosies one of the few snakes that can be accurately sexed visually.)



The evolutionary transition from having legs to losing them was illustrated excellently by Nintendo's new Tsutarja family. Thank you, Nintendo, for doing it right.

3. All scales are the not the same. 

Shoooot, where do I begin with this one? Scales are one of the oldest forms of bodily coverings after slime/mucus. They have a million different forms. There is no "one way" to draw scales. It depends on what kind of scales the creature has; fish scales are different from lizard scales are different from pit viper scales. Even then, what fish, what lizard, and what pit viper are we talking about, here?


Scale Sampler. by ~KuroKarasu on deviantART
The image above is only a small sample of the possible scale varieties that creatures could have. One of them is from a mammal. Seriously.

Rules of thumb:

Fish scales -> rounded, fall off individually.
Lizard scales -> beaded, shed in white, flaky pieces.
Boid scales -> rounded with a slight point; dewdrop-shaped. ALL snakes lack eyelids and instead have a clear scale called a brille covering the eye.
Colubrid/Elapid scales -> think elliptical diamonds.
Viper scales -> Heavily keeled; look almost like flat feathers. (If you try this on a cobra, it will look very wrong, very fast; cobras are elapids, not vipers XP)

Then we have dragons, which are a lot more like pangolins than ANY type of lizard.  At first, I thought that Ciruelo and Dragonology were crazy for calling dragons mammals. Then the pangolin reminded me that, hey, it could happen.

4. According to artists, anything can have pointy sharp teeth. 



What's wrong with this picture? Stegosaurus was an herbivore, that's what. There is NO reason to draw it with pointy sharp teeth that look more like they belong on a carnivorous monitor lizard. Different types of animals have different types of teeth. To be honest, most generic "carnivore" teeth look like they belong on creatures that eat fish.


Note the homogenous teeth that curl slightly backward. This is a moray eel, BTW.

Other carnivorous animals, mammals in particular, have varied teeth. Pit vipers (NOT elapids like cobras) have long, slender fangs that fold backwards into the mouth. (It's really interesting to see these in action...around professionals, of course.)  T-Rex had two different kinds of teeth as well. In terms of mammalian predators, people who draw wolves and lions with nothing but sharp teeth have clearly never owned a petite carnivore.You can look on a cat or dog and prove this one wrong, people.

A gray wolf (Canis lupus) skull.

Part of this error probably stems from the notion that herbivores cannot POSSIBLY be badass. That is  false; herbivores HAVE to be badass, or else the world will fall into disarray. They have claws, bulk, horns and sometimes their own teeth to make sure that only the strong predators survive and only the weak herbivores die. Evolution is an arms race, and it is only fair to acknowledge Mother Nature's full arsenal. One swift kick from a gazelle and that lion on the nature channel will never eat again.

Research your creature's dentition. Herbivores usually have flat, grinding teeth. Carnivores have pointed teeth that may or may not also be serrated like a saw's edge. Stop making things like Black Stego; I fail to see how anyone who knows ANYTHING about dinosaurs could possibly take that thing seriously.

5. Form Fits Function.

"Form fits function" is the most basic rule in the book.  It can also be phrased as "does it work?" If it does not work, it will not look good. Period.

In short, horns, claws, spikes, etc. do not only have to look good, they have to work and look good. There was this one site that had a bunch of animals that had, for whatever reason, evolved their genitalia on their heads. (I got the feeling that, talented though that artist may have been, they had never gotten laid, but that's off-topic.)

How the hell does that work? Wouldn't getting it on that way be...difficult, to say the least? Oh, and messy. Giving birth so close to the mouth and brain (unless the birthing junk was elsewhere) would suck, too.

The easiest way to see if something works is to look at nature. I saw a complaint that the Dire Horse in Avatar is functionally impossible; its legs could not move well, let alone fast. Given that, on Earth, the fewer toes a creature has on the ground, the faster it is (as a general rule), I can see where having six legs would get cumbersome.

The complaint, BTW.

In summary: If you really like animals, do research on them. Learn how they work before you turn yourself into one. That is why I can giggle a little at people who want to be wolves; in the wild, not only are wolves pack animals, but they're cowards when alone. There is a good chance that you would have to be at the bottom of the pack, not the alpha wolf, and being a lone wolf sucks. Sorry to burst your non-conformist bubble.

Creature Feature: Tuatara.

Nature often creates things that have more to them than meets the eye. This is one of them:


What? Were you expecting something more spectacular? That is a tuatara, which is, in itself, a whole new group of reptiles (order Sphenodontia). That makes it about as close to lizards as crocodiles and snakes. They're an old line of reptiles. A really old line.

Tuataras are not living fossils. Despite being of a distinctly ancient lineage, tuataras have changed a lot since the Mesozoic. They are, however, the most unspecialized living amniotes; they have hearts and brains like amphibians, only one chamber to their lungs (if you have ever taken a look inside the human body, you KNOW how significant that is), and move more like salamanders than lizards.

They also have surprisingly uniform skulls when compared to their fossil record. Unlike lizards, they do not have ears; they hear more like turtles than anything with external ear holes. Their spines are linked more like that of a fish than that of a reptile. Speaking of, the little spikes on their backs do look classy, don't they?

In other words, the tuatara is one of those things that looks like a duck, but does not quack like one or walk like one. Or have organs like one.



As if tuatara were not freaky enough, they have third eyes. You have a third eye, too, but it is not nearly as sophisticated as the tuatara's. I want you to do something very simple before I go on: Find you pineal gland.


(If you can't find that but know where the third eye chakra is, that's cool, too.)

Right there (relatively, of course), many reptiles have something called a parietal eye. In most species, the eye does very little besides detect light. In the tuatara, it has rods, cones, a retina and other structures your eye doctor probably told you about if you have ever gone in for an eye exam. It probably came from a real third eye. Of all the things to do with a third eye, the tuatara uses it to gather vitamin D from the sun.


I seeee you.


Fascinating though they may be, tuataras are vulnerable. Many of them were wiped out thanks to Polynesian rats. Get the image of a rat in a grass skirt out of your head; rats are a serious invasive species that tends to cause a ton of ecological damage if previously unestablished.

Alas, tuataras are nigh-on impossible to breed in captivity. One of the requirements for a species to be considered domesticable is a reasonable breeding period relative to humans - that is, a higher maturation and reproductive rate than people. The tuatara takes ten years to become sexually mature; they can breed well into their 60's and live over a hundred years. That's right, when humans are having trouble reproducing, the tuataras are having no problems at all. No Viagra necessary!

Creature Feature: Hagfish

Wait a minute. It's not time for "They Actually Eat That!" What gives, Kuro?

This one was gross enough to warrant its own entry beyond "They Actually Eat That." Hagfish (class Myxini) are disgusting, slimy and fascinating enough to be cool without being food, even if Korea does eat them. If you're trying to not be a nation of weird food, Korea, you are failing. Dog I'll buy, but what conditions led to hagfish on the menu? You'll see why this is gross as hell in a sec. Condoms are not involved in my reasoning.



Hagfish are not technically fish. Although they look a lot like eels, they have no spinal cord or jaws to speak of - the only bone in their bodies is their skull. (This makes them technically invertebrates.) They do not have toothy jaws, instead having toothy projections in their mouths that just act like teeth. Their mouths are also framed with bar- no, wait, those are totally tentacles from a Japanese porno mag.


This is seriously Grade A Fetish Fodder.

Freaked out yet? No? Keep reading and watching:



Hagfish are slimy. That is not an opinion, it is a fact. Their long, eel-like bodies are covered in a mucous coating that makes them extremely slippery and becomes stinky, gooey gunk when mixed with water. This slime can turn a 5-liter bucket of water into nothing but slime in mere minutes. A hagfish is so slimy that it has to tie itself in a knot just so that it can breathe outside of its own slime every now and then.

As one might be able to guess from all of its primitive traits, the hagfish has gone unchanged for eons. The hagfish first appeared around 330 million years ago in the Late Carboniferous Period - waaaayyyyyy earlier than the dinosaurs everyone knows and loves. Scientists are not kidding when they say that this creature is almost an evolutionary transition point from invertebrates to fish. Now, if only it could evolve to produce just a little less slime.


If you need to do acrobatics just to get out of your own self-defense, something is wrong.

Hagfish are in every ocean, spanning 5 genera. Several new species have recently been discovered in the deepsea abyss - y'know, the place where nightmares are born and Cthulhu has a sweet pad called R'lyeh. Sleep tight.

Creature Feature: Dimetrodon.

I have been doing a lot of mammals this past week. Pop quiz: What makes a mammal a mammal?

If you answered fur/hair, three middle ear bones, a neocortex and milk, good for you. Most of you probably only knew two out of those and maybe had an inkling about the brain. The least commonly known feature about the three ear bones is actually really, really important.

That's ALL it takes to be considered a mammal. Live births are done by every vertebrate except birds; some mammals lay eggs. Even being warm-blooded is barely a qualifier, seeing as naked mole rats and a few other underground mammals have had to turn off their inner furnaces.


O hai.

Now, suppose that you were given an unknown skull. How would you know if it was a mammal or a reptile? You do not have fur, nipples or brain tissue to work with, so what is left?

Yep. Those darn ear bones.

During mammalian evolution, something weird happened to the mammalian jaw. It lost two components that evolved into two tiny little ear bones that gave them a greater range of hearing and a more solid jaw. Looking for these is a pretty good indicator that you have a mammal on your hands and not another lizard.

An even better indicator is the teeth. Reptiles rarely have differentiated teeth; they do not chew their food, they gulp it down. When they do have differentiated teeth, science usually cares enough to say it in Greek.


Skull of Heterodon ('different tooth') nasicus, the Western hognose snake. This snake will get its own entry at some point- probably whenever Kuro gets a legal permit to handle them.

Thus, Dimetrodon - 'two-measure tooth.'


Mammals had epic ancestors.

Dimetrodon was not a dinosaur. It lived during approximately the right age (but earlier than the Triassic) and had a fin like Spinosaurus, but it was not a dinosaur. Look at the legs and how very lizardlike they are; that should be a sign. More importantly, look at the teeth.



Dimetrodon was a synapsid - a distant relative of mammals. It was probably an apex predator. There are also several other sail-finned synapsids, but similar to how T-Rex is representative of an age when dinosaurs ruled the Earth (even though it was only around in the Cretaceous Period- the LAST period of the Mesozoic), Dimetrodon represents all synapsids. Rarely is it acknowledged as such, although The Simpsons did a pretty good job:


(Tyrannosaurus and Stegosaurus never lived at the same time, BTW.)

In many plastic Dimetrodon specimens, the teeth are homogenous. One look at the jaw on a real specimen tells you that they are not. There's a ridge on each side with three teeth that are clearly larger than the rest, indicating that Dimetrodon could shear smaller chunks of meat off of its kill for easier digestion. This is more characteristic of modern mammals than of lizards (although some dinosaurs did sport different teeth as well; T-Rex had a far more regular formation of two different sizes of teeth).

Compared to avian evolution, mammalian evolution gets very little press. Gee, I wonder why...


When the Good Book goes bad.

Modern mammals are still classified and distinguished by their dentition. Even though some mammals lack teeth entirely (anteaters and pangolins come to mind), this stuff still matters. Mammals are not as homogenous as most people think they are; they have just as obscure methods of classification as birds and reptiles.

Creature Feature: Cheetahs.

Wait, cheetahs? Those are not weird. Those are felids. Cheetahs are well-known predators on the African savannah. They're notorious for being the fastest land animals and selling cheese puffs to kids. Why the eff are they here?


The spots are right, but the HEAD, it burns!

Well, there are several subspecies of cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus). They are not just native to Africa. Their range extends all the way to Iran, Pakistan, and perhaps India. The cheetah's name comes from the Hindi cita, so even if they are not still living in that area, they were there at one point.

The cheetah is meant for one thing: Speed. It lives up to its title of the fastest land animal alive, sprinting at speeds of up to 75 mph (120km/h). It has a slender body, long legs, a long tail, and fixed (as opposed to retractable) claws, a trait shared with only two other types of cat. (Its generic name, "Acinonyx," literally means "immobile claw.")



Do not let nature programs about superpredators fool you. There were tradeoffs when the cheetah became so specialized. Unlike other big cats, cheetahs cannot climb or roar; instead, they chirp. They may be one of the most successful hunters on the savannah, but because they run so fast, they often wind up exhausted after the kill. This gives other predators ample time to steal what they can of the cheetah's meal.

Essentially, cheetahs are feline greyhounds; they were used as such by aristocrats for hunting parties. How they domesticated the cats, I have no idea; cheetahs captured from the wild were preferable for hunting. This is the rough equivalent of catching a wolf and expecting it to listen to you.


Cheetah domestication goes as far back as ancient Egypt. The Mongols also had cheetahs at their disposal.

They are also in danger of dying out, and this time it is not mankind's fault. Sure, poaching does not help the issue, but for once, humans get away with a slap on the wrist.

For some reason -seriously, nobody knows why- cheetahs went through an evolutionary bottleneck. That means that there were so few individuals left that they had to resort to inbreeding to survive. This led to considerably reduced fertility and a genetic relationship so close that skin grafts from an unrelated cheetah will not be rejected by another.


So, uh...you two cousins or something?

Perhaps because of this genetic proximity, there is a 'tabby' mutation in cheetah species. These 'king cheetahs' were originally thought to be another subspecies. Then they found that the odd coat pattern was caused by the same gene that caused tabby stripes in normal house cats, removing much of the king cheetah's majesty. (The power of a morph at work, folks.)


A 'tabby' cheetah.

Given how closely related cheetahs are as a species, a mutation like the king cheetah is certainly welcome. As pointed out in my 'breed' segment, many traits tend to be linked together, such as hairlessness and dentition issues in dogs. For the cheetah, any mutation is a good mutation.

National Geographic dubbed the tigerfish "evolution on steroids." The cheetah is probably worthy of that title as well.