Aquila Children's Magazine AQUILA Magazine Best Bits | Page 18

What animals have you seen today?
Maybe you spotted a fox rummaging
for rubbish in your backyard, or a
robin flapping about in the
birdbath? Perhaps you watched a
wildlife documentary and saw a lion
dozing on the savannah? How about
that video you watched on YouTube:
10 DEADLY GUINEA PIGS: PETTING
ZOO PANIC? Just imagine for a
second how few animals you’d know
about if we hadn’t invented the
camera and couldn’t travel easily to
other places.
Liar, liAr, PantS on fIrE!
Explorers used to return from their
travels with stories of the strange ‘new’
creatures they had seen. Many people
laughed at them. They thought the
explorers were making it all up. Here
are just some of the animals people in
Europe once refused to believe
were real.
PeliCans
Carl Linnaeus was a well-respected
Swedish biologist in the 1700s (yes,
yes, we’ve all heard of him; classic
Homo sapiens, ed) . Yes, but even he
made mistakes. When he wrote about
mythical, un-real animals, he included
pelicans. After all, who would seriously
believe in a huge bird with a bag under
its beak? He thought the Americans
just had over-enthusiastic
imaginations!
WinD yoUr nEck In!
The Plesiosaurus lived in the sea 135 to
120 million years ago. Mary Anning,
the famous fossil hunter, found the first
near-complete fossilised skeleton in
1823. Georges Cuvier had just
suggested that ancient species of
animals might have died out and
become extinct but he denied Mary’s
find because it had too many bones in its
neck. He called a special meeting of the
Geological Society of London to
disprove her, but women – including
Mary – were not allowed in. (Talk about
dinosaurs! Geddit? Eh? Never mind.)
A respected (male) geologist, William
Conybeare believed Mary and, after
much argument, Georges (eventually)
admitted how wrong he had been.
PlaTypuS
In 1797/1798, 28 years after Captain
Cook landed in Australia, a skin of the
amazing duck-billed platypus arrived in
London. It wasn’t unusual for people to
create false animals then; ‘mermaids’
had been made by sewing the (dead)
body of a monkey to the tail of a fish
(that ’s all charming and lovely, Ed) .
So, when faced with a creature that
looked like a mole, with webbed feet, a
duck’s bill and a beaver’s tail, the
Natural History Museum’s biologist,
Dr. George Shaw, naturally thought