Dasyurus maculatus
This is a tiger quoll, or spot-tailed quoll. Tiger quolls are the largest carnivorous marsupials on mainland Australia (the largest in the world being the Tasmanian devil), and mainly feed on medium-sized animals like mice, birds, and possums, although at times their diet can extend to small wallabies. (It’s not opossums they eat, incidentally - as I’m sure any Aussie would tell you, Australian possums are significantly different from American opossums and look like this. But that’s entirely off the subject.)
Fun fact: during tiger quoll courtship the males can end up quite severely biting the females, and the actual copulation can take up to eight hours. Being a female quoll sucks.
There are four species of quoll in Australia (and two in New Guinea); while at most parts of Australia were once inhabited by at least one quoll species, their populations have declined since European settlement due to habitat loss and introduced predators like foxes.
Scotoplanes
So the best article on the internet for learning about SEA PIGS is Chris M’s post over on his Echinoblog. If you wanna know more, please check it out…
“Scotoplanes live in the ABYSS. That’s not just a little deep..that’s the DEEPEST part of the ocean on the flat oceanic plains. Its not unusual for sea pigs to be collected from over 6000 meters!!! How deep is that? That’s about 3.7 miles DOWN (by contrast the Grand Canyon at its deepest point is only about 1.1 miles deep). Some can be found shallower..but they live across a wide bathymetric range.
Scotoplanes don’t just occur individually either. Collections and observations of these animals show that they often number in the hundreds. Early trawling records have recorded some 300-600 specimens per trawl…”(read more: Echinoblog)
These things are wonderful.
Aphanapteryx bonasia
This is a drawing from around 1600 of a Red Rail (also known as the Red Hen of Mauritius), and all I can show you is drawings because - like their significantly more famous island-mates, dodos - they are super extinct.
Red Rails were slightly bigger than chickens, with reddish-brown plumage, and resembled kiwi birds. Wikipedia says “The Red Rail is discussed in almost every report about Mauritius from 1602 on; however, the details provided are repetitive and do not shed much light on the bird’s life history” because the reports mostly just talked about how Red Rails were apparently were a good substitute for pork (dodos were less palatable), how to best hunt them, etc etc. They were flightless, curious, and unused to predators, which made them pretty easy to catch. In addition, they nested on the ground, leaving their eggs and young vulnerable to being eaten by the pigs that the settlers had brought with them.
It’s assumed they had been hunted to extinction around 1700, about a century after European settlers first arrived on Mauritius.
Proteles cristata
This is an aardwolf! They live in eastern and southern Africa, and, as I’m sure you can deduce, are not related to aardvarks in any way — they’re hyenas. (Fun fact: the internet is telling me that “aardvark” translates from Dutch/Afrikaans to “earth pig”. Guess what “aardwolf” means?)
There are only four living species of hyenas, the most familiar one being spotted hyenas, and aardwolves are both the smallest (slightly larger than a fox or jackal) and the only insectivore. They mostly eat termites, and as such have broad sticky tongues to lick them up with. A single aardwolf can eat up to 300 000 termites in a night.
Also, their babies are awfully cute:
The Indian gharial is a species of crocodile which is critically endangered.
Gavialis gangeticus
Unlike some other crocodilians, a gharial couldn’t eat you if it wanted to since their jaws are so long and delicate; they’ve evolved to be fish-eaters. Also they’re the only visibly sexual dimorphic crocodilian! Full-grown gents have a growth on the tip of their snouts called a ghara, which they use to make super sexy amplified buzzing sounds.
According to the IUCN, as of 2006 there were fewer than 200 wild adults left in India and less than 35 in Nepal. They’re virtually extinct everywhere else.
awkward first post ahoy
To sum things up: hello, I think animals are awesome.
So basically, one day someone reblogged a picture of a maned wolf on a dashboard and hadn’t heard of them before, and I was suddenly filled with the urge to tell them everything I knew about maned wolves, because they are cool. Then I thought, “Man, it would be cool to have a blog about animals people don’t necessarily know a lot about.”
Then I procrastinated for a month. But after some gentle nudging this now exists!
Please note I have no education in zoology; this is entirely for fun and I’ll most likely be running off what I’ve learned from documentaries and Google for the majority of my information. Of course, I intend to do my best to avoid it, but if I do post any misinformation here, corrections would be hugely appreciated, as long as you’re not a dick about it.
Also, my criteria for “unloved” is essentially “not a household name” (with a North American bias, which I apologise for) and entirely flexible depending on what I feel like posting.
