Monday, July 18, 2011

Animal Alphabet: P is for Pangolin

This week's entry in the Animal Alphabet is "Another armored animal..."




Here's a link to an ARKive video that will show you the funny bipedal walking that Marianne Moore describes in her poem.

The pangolin is the only mammal that is covered with scales.

Real overlapping scales have evolved in four places in the history of life on earth, as far as I know. The most obvious is in a subset of the reptiles (lizards and snakes). The name of that group, the squamates, derives from the Latin word for scale.

Can you tell me the other two groups of animals that have overlapping scales? Both groups are extant, not extinct.

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