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.
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"
