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fandomhigh2018-02-14 12:42 am
livingartifact) wrote in fandomhigh2018-02-14 12:42 am
Entry tags:
Earth Zoology, Wednesday
"Welcome back, students," Jenkins greeted as his class gathered. "I assure you, the amphibious plague that afflicted us last week has been taken care of. Today, we are being visited instead by something I hope you will find rather more agreeable, if for no other reason than that it would find it terribly difficult to jump onto anyone's head." He smiled, waving the students into the classroom, where they would find three large, faintly rock-like creatures making their slow way around the room.
"May I present to you all the giant tortoise. Ah! Martha! None of that now!" Jenkins hurried over to where one of the tortoises had gotten it into its head to try to eat some of the papers from the table. "That is not for tortoises!" He collected the papers and after a quick look around for some place harder for the enormous creatures to reach, finally simply stuffed them into his jacket.
"Giant tortoises," he said again, with rather a bit less of the same dramatic flair. "These particular specimens hail from the Galapagos Islands, a well known collection of islands off the coast of a country called Ecuador, where the man credited with discovering evolution did much of his foundational research. They are prime examples of a phenomenon known as island gigantism, wherein a species, when shunted off onto a small island by circumstance, will develop into a much larger organism than its relatives back on the mainland. I rather suspect that this may account for Fandom's population of alots, as well. I rather think there might be a lot of fascinating island-related dimorphism\ going on in Fandom's native species, in fact."
It would explain a lot, really.
"But back to our tortoises. Quite a very long time ago, giant reptiles not unlike these creatures was the norm on the planet Earth. Nowadays, our friends here are ranked fifteenth in the category of heaviest reptiles in the world. They are also some of the longest lived. Four of the top five longest living terrestrial non-human animals in on record are giant tortoises. The longest, it is said, lived to be 255." He glanced over to flash Peridot a small smile at this factif she was there. It was cute, the ages that humans thought of as 'really old'.
"As you can see, the giant tortoise is a fairly placid creature, a fact that was nearly their downfall, along with their substantial size and propensity for survival on the barest of rations. Many of the more disreputable European visitors to the island took to capturing the creatures in order to keep a store of cheap, readily accessible fresh meat, which resulted in more than a few tortoise species going extinct. The Galapagos giant tortoise is currently listed as 'vulnerable', meaning that humans are expected to treat them with care, lest the Earth lose anymore of its wonderful diversity."
"May I present to you all the giant tortoise. Ah! Martha! None of that now!" Jenkins hurried over to where one of the tortoises had gotten it into its head to try to eat some of the papers from the table. "That is not for tortoises!" He collected the papers and after a quick look around for some place harder for the enormous creatures to reach, finally simply stuffed them into his jacket.
"Giant tortoises," he said again, with rather a bit less of the same dramatic flair. "These particular specimens hail from the Galapagos Islands, a well known collection of islands off the coast of a country called Ecuador, where the man credited with discovering evolution did much of his foundational research. They are prime examples of a phenomenon known as island gigantism, wherein a species, when shunted off onto a small island by circumstance, will develop into a much larger organism than its relatives back on the mainland. I rather suspect that this may account for Fandom's population of alots, as well. I rather think there might be a lot of fascinating island-related dimorphism\ going on in Fandom's native species, in fact."
It would explain a lot, really.
"But back to our tortoises. Quite a very long time ago, giant reptiles not unlike these creatures was the norm on the planet Earth. Nowadays, our friends here are ranked fifteenth in the category of heaviest reptiles in the world. They are also some of the longest lived. Four of the top five longest living terrestrial non-human animals in on record are giant tortoises. The longest, it is said, lived to be 255." He glanced over to flash Peridot a small smile at this fact
"As you can see, the giant tortoise is a fairly placid creature, a fact that was nearly their downfall, along with their substantial size and propensity for survival on the barest of rations. Many of the more disreputable European visitors to the island took to capturing the creatures in order to keep a store of cheap, readily accessible fresh meat, which resulted in more than a few tortoise species going extinct. The Galapagos giant tortoise is currently listed as 'vulnerable', meaning that humans are expected to treat them with care, lest the Earth lose anymore of its wonderful diversity."