Beautiful Animals

Tres beautiful, Arella Mae. Thanks mucho. Oops. I'm mixing my languages.

Long-eared jerboa:

Bat-eared fox:

You would think his ears would be the first thing I noticed about that fox but it wasn't. It was those startling green eyes.

the daily B & O

Finally, the truth is out! Polar bears are Irish!!!

From yesterday's CSMonitor......
Twisted lines of ancestry seem to have intertwined two very different species: the water-loving polar bear and the forest-loving Irish brown bear. Despite being so different, the two seem to have found love: Meeting and breeding at least once during the last 120,000 years, the two species gave rise to the polar bears we know today.

"The Irish genetic sequences are much closer to the modern polar bear," said study researcher Daniel Bradley, of Trinity College Dublin. "As the climate has changed, what we are seeing is the tracking of that climatic change in the sequences in the bears."

a friend of mine spilled Guinness on a white carpet one time, the resulting stain was very similar to the bears coat, coincidence, i think not

"Please do not step in the melted puppy: Poor thing must have been lying in the sun too long. (Her name is Mastino Napoletano, and she has just won her category at the World Dog Show in Villepeinte, France.)"
Photo: Remy de la Mauviniere / AP/ SFgate




"One day soon these baby pelicans on Alabama's Gaillard Island will grow feathers and stop reminding us of the meat aisle at Safeway."
Photo: Ben Raines / Mobile Press-Register/sfgate

what a great pup, and what a great colour

I figured out after a while that the puppy must be a neopolitan mastiff..

Are Mastiffs wrinkly like that when they are small? I thought it was a Sharpei?

Great slide show of animals here -
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/gallery/2011/jul/08/week-in-wildlife-in-pictures


Here's a few of them:

"A ladybird is seen on a stalk of wheat in Les Essarts, western France" Photograph: Denis Balibouse/Reuters




"A herd of giraffe moves through the Bandiglio national park in Southern Sudan, which will become the world's newest country tomorrow. The park is home to the world's second largest migration of animals, where vast herds of gazelle and antelope move through a region which had been assumed to have been denuded of its wildlife by years of civil war."
Photograph: Paul Elkan/AFP/Getty Images




"A peacock butterfly feeds on budleia blossom in Herdecke, Germany" Photograph: BERND THISSEN/EPA




There's lots more, including a cloud leopard.. golden monkeys..

This reminds me of the one bedtime story I remember my mother telling me (there were likely many more, but this one stuck) - about a lion taking care of regular domestic kittens, holding them by the scruff of the neck..
funny how some memories last.

Love the bit about polar bears being Irish!

One more from that slide show, osso:

the daily B & O

dj, Love dat bunny. And it made me smile to see the hand-holding otters.

Squirrel monkey investigating camera:

the daily B & O (&K)

I'm still a-wow about the sea otters holding hands.
Very dear.

Ireland has bears? But no snakes? That's Irish.

dj, Verra cute bunny. Cute kitten. The O looks a tad off.

Ocelot: