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The Mystery of The Ungulating Platypus |
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I was in a Platypal mood (don't ask. Platypusses are cool!), so i was looking for pictures of Platypusses (platypi?) in the Yahoo Clipart. I did find one, as you see. I also found a picture of an armadillo. Armadillo's are cool to, so I will put it here as well (I told you i was random!) |
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I also found this picture, titled 'ungulate.gif'.
My reaction was something to the effect of: "What on earth is an ungulate?!?" To me it sounded more like a verb (hence the title). So I did some research. (I happen to think doing research is fun, ok?) |
| MSN Learning and Research was able to tell me this:
"Ungulate, any hoofed mammal. The ungulates constitute a large group of dissimilar animals whose last toe joints are encased in hooves. The group is..." for the rest, I would have had to pay I don't know about you, but that isn't enough information for me. So I searched on.... |
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| The online Encyclopedia Britanica (which I can access through my school) tells me:
"generally, any hoofed mammal. Although the term is no longer used in formal classification, it is still widely applied to a diverse group of placental mammals that are characterized as hoofed, herbivorous quadrupeds. The feature that unites them, the hoof, consists of hornlike dermal (skin) tissue, comparable to the human fingernail, which extends over the end of a broadened terminal digit. Modern hoofed mammals are composed of four orders: Artiodactyla, even-toed ungulates (swine, camels, deer, and bovines); Perissodactyla, odd-toed ungulates (horses, tapirs, and rhinoceroses); Proboscidea (elephants); and Hyracoidea (hyraxes). Ten orders of fossil ungulates are also recognized: Condylarthra (condylarths); Pyrotheria (pyrotheres); Xenungulata (xenungulates); Pantodonta (pantodonts); Dinocerata (uintatheres); Desmostylia (desmostylians); Embrithopoda (embrithopods); Notoungulata (notoungulates, including the toxodonts); Astrapotheria (astrapotheres); and Litopterna (litopterns). " Not exactly light reading, is it? "over the end of a broadened terminal digit"???? My gues wou be hat means : over the edge of a broad last toe I'm searching on! |
| World Book says::
"Ungulate, pronounced UHNG gyuh liht or UHNG gyuh layt, is any mammal whose toes end in hoofs. The name comes from the Latin word ungula, meaning hoof. Scientists divide ungulates into two groups, odd-toed ungulates and even-toed ungulates. Odd-toed ungulates include horses, which have one toe on each foot, and rhinoceroses, with three. Even-toed ungulates include deer, with two toes per foot, and pigs, with four. Ungulates are the only horned mammals, but not all ungulates have horns. All ungulates are herbivores (animals that eat chiefly plants). Elephants, the largest land animals, are ungulates. Contributor: Valerius Geist, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus of Environmental Sciences, University of Calgary." |
| Since that was a lot of text, here is anice origami platypus: |
it's from http://member.nifty.ne.jp/kakitsuka/gallery/gallery_e.html |
| So what would an ungulating platypus look like? Probably something like this: |