Disclaimer:

Disclaimer: If you are easily offended by sheer honesty, or you think me having my own opinions is "being negative", then this is not the place for you, and I suggest you leave and head elsewhere. I call a spade a spade, and I don't sugarcoat anything.

Tuesday, December 4, 2018

Am I Losing Connection?

Man! On Quora, I've noticed that I'm getting a lot of shit from people for posting this one answer. LOL! The question was about what are some weird facts about animals that nobody else knows. I took some of the most interesting and unusual facts from a 2008 blog in this site (that I actually got from an old email I received back then) and posted them as my response to that question. I also added an extra one myself that was not on that list about Streaked tenrecs. Well over the past couple of days, several people have told me that several things I listed are wrong. LOL! I just sit back and smile at them, because the only one that nobody has said was wrong was the one I wrote about Streaked tenrecs. Only the ones I got off that old list. They were things I never knew of was right or wrong, but I listed them in my answer because they were the most interesting.

Anyway, people are going to see those and say I don't know shit about animals. I remember last year, Gabby Guthrie said the same thing because I said that a dog, someone claimed was a husky, actually looked more like an akita. Gabby mocked my opinion because she was an akita owner. Well, I believe whole-heartedly she was just a teenager (or an old fart who thinks like a teenager) playing games with me. That's why I have her blocked on Facebook. I'm not there to play games with kids. Nor with people who think like kids. Shoot! That was the reason I used to hate show breeders. Because the ones I used to meet acted like little kids on the playground! That's still the reason I hate ADS people too. But really, if the only indication she had that I don't know about animals is me seeing a dog, that looked like an akita, and saying so, then that's not bad. Really! I never said it was an akita. I just said it looked like one.

But anyways, all that aside. After seeing those people on Quora correcting the things I wrote in my answer, I wonder, have I lost my knowledge of animals? I really have not been keeping up with the latest findings about modern animals. That's because the new findings go against what I learned as a kid. For example, now the Malagasy carnivores have been taken out of the family of mongooses and civets. Modern scientists have found that they've been isolated long enough to perpetuate a whole new family. But I don't see it that way. I see it the way I've always seen it, that they look like mongooses, so they are mongooses. But then again, one could argue that because opossums look like rats, that they must be rats. Or that because koalas look like bears, then they must be bears. Or because lions look more like dogs, that they must be dogs. Which I know is not so. But now, because of new studies in DNA, people are finding out differences we used to think was just simply variety, now constitute these animals to represent different families.

I dunno, I will never get used to the new methods! That's why I stopped studying today's animals. I stick with my mammals of tomorrow. I'd rather do that than anything. At least I know if an animal is different, I can place it in a different group myself. I have a simple classification method I use in my Metazoic site; I separate animals in groups of Large Grazers, Small Grazers, Carnivores, Flying Mammals, and Pentadactyls (formerly primates). Although a family can be divided among those groups. For example the Metazoic kangaroo family. There are small grazers and large grazers in that group in the Metazoic. But there is also one carnivorous genus; Carnophalanger. It is Australia's top predator in the Metazoic. It reins above all else, even crocodiles. You'd never known it was related to a group of nearly 100% grazers. Unlike the majority of kangaroos today, in the Metazoic most roos are able to move their legs independently. So, Carnophalanger moves more like an ostrich. It only hops when it needs to.

Anyways, that is why I don't know much about modern animals. Not as much as I used to. I guess I've lost touch with modern studies. I still class the Malagasy carnivores in the same family with mongooses and civets today, and in the Metazoic, even expanded the family. I will always class them together. I see very little difference. I call it simple variety. And anyways, I prefer to keep going with my Metazoic animals anyways. As soon as I reach my goal of 5000 species of mammals in the Metazoic, then I will concentrate on birds of the Metazoic. I've already got a page dedicated to flightless birds in the Metazoic. As soon as I reach my goal for the mammals, I'll work on flying birds. First, I'm thinking of coming up with more Microchiropters. I should! In today's world, they outnumber the pteropods. Although I like the pteropods better. They're cuter. But I know cuter does not always mean they will outrank their uglier competitors. If that were so, then African wild dogs would outrank lions in Africa! Well, the dogs are better hunters. But they are also cuter than lions are. However, they are not as strong when they stand alone against a lion.

Well, in the Metazoic, I think I'll keep the main difference between the pteropods and microbats being that the pteropods are active during the day, and microbats only at night. We need some night mammals in the Metazoic. I don't have many. I'm trying to make tomorrow's mammals opposite of what they are today. Most mammals today are active mostly at night. Lately even some that have been active during the day are moving around more at night because of humans. But in the Metazoic, humans are gone. So, mammals can move around more during the day.

But anyways, I'm either losing touch or losing my mind. Well, I lost my mind long ago. LOL! But I am also losing touch with modern animals because I've been working too hard on my futuristic mammals. Even in my stories, almost all the animals I use in my stories are from my Metazoic site. Well, that started with the story "The Mischievous Mongoose". When that story was first written by a friend, and I used to take it to school to get other peoples' opinions of it. Most people saw it was about a mongoose and right off they'd think "It sounds like Rikki Tikki Tavi." Well, I got tired of that. So did the friend I had that wrote the story. Well, in 1994, after working on my Metazoic project for a while, I got an idea. How about use one of the mongoose species from that project instead and rewrite the whole story over again? And it worked! With the permission from the remaining family, I rewrote the story to accommodate one of the mongooses from my collection. I chose this guy...


Meet Tarboailurus, a giant mongoose of the future. Definitely NOT Rikki Tikki Tavi!! This is an 18-foot long version of Rikki Tikki Tavi. And his only prey is not snakes. Though they could take on an anaconda and win. Although Diana, the mongoose in the story, is a baby throughout the story, she does play with dangerous snakes and kills them. But in the end, she and her new friends, Jasper and Katie, meet "The Mad Anaconda", who takes Katie as his prey. And Diana rescues her.

Tarboailurus is BIG!! But it is also very fast, just like modern mongooses. It has 12-inch long canines that it uses to stab it's prey. It has retractable claws like a cat's, to subdue it's prey. It also has a long, stiff tail that is used for balance when it leaps onto the back of a large prey animal. And yes, if this animal were around today, it'd be very dangerous to humans! You couldn't imagine being chased by an 18-foot long animal that moves like lightening, with 12-inch sharp teeth and 5-inch razor-sharp claws, and sees you as prey. No human could survive that!

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