Diceros bicornis female and male

Some cool extinct animals images:

Diceros bicornis female and male

Image by kibuyu
Black Rhinos doing it, London Zoo.
Amazing how this activity draws in the voyeurs - even you!

So... you've had your thrill...now what are YOU going to do to ensure that these amazing animals don't become extinct? Right now the few remaining rhinos are being hammered by poachers for their valuable horns. Only a few thousand rhinos are left on our planet, and 7 billion people - who is the horniest?
Google "rhino conservation" and get started.

LEPRACHAUNS ARE NOT IRISH

Image by Fergal Mac Eoinin
LEPRACHAUNS ARE NOT IRISH
Some time back Ireland was derided as a land peopled by peasants, priests and pixies. Apart from the laudable alliteration it was an ugly stereotype spawned from an equally stereotypical English buffoon called Robert Kilroy-Silk. The quotation dates from 2002; yes that late – in a time when peasants were long gone, priests almost extinct and pixies were never part of Irish lore!

Yes, it may come as a surprise to most people but Irish mythology has no pixies or little fairies in it at all. We have giants, gods, heroes, pookas, banshees (and their male equicvalents; the shidhe) – but there were no leprechauns and certainly no little people. There is no doubt that Victorian Ireland was highly superstitious. Even today there are people who believe in ghosts and other spirits. However the Irish are no more superstitious than any other western nation. Leprechauns and other little people dancing comes from a romantic confusion caused by translating the Irish word Sidhe with the English word fairy.

The Sidhe were in fact a race of fully grown supernatural beings. Their existence goes back to Celtic religion and they were far from being friendly little people that sat on toadstools making shoes. Irish people didn’t wear shoes very often in the Victorian age. The Leprechaun is closer to the Germanic tradition as found in Shakespeare’s Mid-Summer Night’s Dream; ironically – it was the English that developed the idea of little people not the Irish. The Anglo-Irish writers of the so-called Celtic Twilight certainly adopted the imagery and Leprechaun culture goes back no further than the late nineteenth century.

The Sidhe (fairies) were a race of violent and dangerous people who did harm. The Beansidhe (lit; Woman Fairy) was an omen of death and her cry was the herald of the passing of another life. Her companions robbed children from their cradles in an early explanation of cot death. People who lost their reasoning were believed to have encountered these beings and the common expression “Tá sé imithe leis na Sidhe!” (he’s away with the fairies) describes a person who has lost the plot. It was believed that the encounter with the Sidhe was so terrible that it would drive a person insane.

These beings lived underground and the ancient portal tombs of Ireland were avoided as gates into their world. Farmers would not cross the hillocks or allow animals to graze them. Even to this day it is common to see a circle of stones and trees around a hillock in the middle of a field. The area is still fenced to stop animals wandering onto it. These ancient tombs lead some of us to believe that the Sidhe were the remnants of mythical races that lived in Ireland before the arrival of the Celts.

The Púca (Pooka) was a supernatural being who could change into other forms and travel at great speeds. The Púca was normally associated with black stallions but could appear in any form. His intention was to entice the person to travel with him but he didn’t necessarily harm them. Most Irish speakers translate the word púca as ghost. The ordinary Irish word for a ghost is taibhse.

The interchangeable use of the two words indicates that the appearance of the púca was normally the appearance of a dead person. That of itself might be frightening enough but apart from the fear factor the stories are simply common folklore. Ghost stories exist in every tradition and the púca, rather than the sidhe, are the ghosts of Irish folklore.

Giants and Heroes also played a large part in the mythology. The Fir-bolg were a legandery race of giants, the Red-Branch and Fianna were legendary warrior classes and the Tuatha de Danann were a legendary spiritual race that conquered Ireland in pre-history.

Formal education in nineteenth century Ireland was reserved to the wealthy land-owning classes. Naturally their peasants and servants were kept in ignorance and superstition is the handmaiden of ignorance. The superstitions of the common Irish were very much the butt of English humour through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Irish were presented as ignorant, backward and stupid. The advent of political correctness in the 1980s left many English comedians bereft of material. Visitors from the United States complained about the racialist (now racist) humour that was the mainstay of comedy in the BBC and ITN. With the odd exception of people such as Mr. Kilroy-Silk, the bulk of the British comedy establishment has long moved on from jokes about miserly Scots, stupid Irish, violent Germans, odorous Frenchmen and loud Americans. The origin of the idea of Irish backwardness had its roots in Victorian Britain and that is also where the idea of leprechauns comes from too.

There was one other type of nocturnal ne’er-do-well common in Irish lore. This was called a Toraí (Tory) and he was human rather than supernatural. The Tory was the kind of person who would burn your fields at night, or release your herds or do some other wanton damage. The Klu Klux Klan in the United States was a good example of a group of Tories. The name was applied as a term of insult for members of the Conservative Party – and the old saying goes, ”if the [pixie] cap fits; wear it!” and, the Conservatives weren’t offended at all, in fact they were quite proud of the adage and adopted it as their usual name.

I know that Bord Fáilte and most gift-shops won’t thank me for this but; the leprechaun souvenirs that were made in China are about as Irish as Hong Kong is!

But Hong Kong was British
And so were pixies!

Baron Cuvier and the cetaceans

Image by seriykotik1970
The ground floor of Paris's "Museum of Comparative anatomy and Palaeontology".

Cuvier was the father of Palaeontology- the first scientist to study and name extinct species. He had a very big head- which led scientists to spend the better part of a century trying to find a correlation between brain size and intelligence. They couldn't.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Cuvier

"In my work on Fossil Bones, I set myself the task of identifying the animals whose fossilized remains fill the surface strata of the earth. This project meant I had to travel along a path where we had so far taken only a few tentative steps. As a new sort of antiquarian, I had to learn to restore these memorials to past upheavals and, at the same time, to decipher their meaning. I had to collect and put together in their original order the fragments which made up these animals, to reconstruct the ancient creatures to which these fragments belonged, to recreate their proportions and characteristics, and finally to compare them to those alive today on the surface of the earth. This was an almost unknown art, which assumed a science hardly touched upon up until now, that of the laws which govern the formal coexistence of the various parts in organic beings. Thus, I had to prepare myself for these studies through a much longer research into animals which presently exist. Only an almost universal review of present creation could provide some proof for my results concerning created life long ago. But at the same time such a study had to provide me with a large collection of equally demonstrable rules and interconnections. In the course of this exploration into a small part of the theory of the earth, I would have to be able to subject the entire animal kingdom in some way to new laws. "

From Cuvier's Introduction to his "Discourse on the Revolutionary Upheavals on the surface of the globe and on the changes which they have produced in the animal kingdom"