I was born an oaf and I’ll die an oaf

Well, that’s length-wise rather than height-wise, but yes! That would be the giant river otter (Pteronura brasiliensis), fellow countrymen of mine!

In fact, saying they’re 170 cm (5’7”) from head to tail is lowballing it a little. Some individuals as long as 180 cm (5’11”) have been recorded! Which is longer than I am tall 😔

You might have noticed that giant otters have a bit of a big cat-like look about themselves. That’s the origin of their name in Brazilian Portuguese, ariranha, which is a term from the Tupi-Guarani language and means “river jaguar”. And, just like ground jaguars, giant otters are apex predators as well: they mainly eat fish, but will hunt anything from snakes, turtles and even small caimans if given the opportunity!

Besides their size, giant otters have other traits that set them apart from their smaller cousins. For one, unlike most mustelids, they’re social animals who live in familial groups of up to twenty individuals, which whom they communicate constantly through a variety of different noises. Also, unlike other species of otter, whose tails are thick at the base and pointy at the end, giant otters’ tails also start out with a thick base, but they end up flat, which helps propel them through the water. The interesting thing about it, however, it’s that it’s not flat in an horizontal way, like the tails of other semiaquatic mammals such as beavers and platypuses. It’s flat vertically, not unlike the tail of a newt!

“average otter looks like fuzzy teddy bear” factoid actualy just statistical error. average otter looks like big wet weasel.

Sea Otter Georg, who lives in cold ocean & has the densest fur of any mammal, around 1200 times denser than human hair, to keep warm is an outlier adn should not have been counted

1979

The song that launched a thousand lo-fi ships

“Midget Submarines” plunges the listener into a frantic, mechanical underworld.