PRIMITIVE

I recently visited the Japanese wolf memorial in rural Higashiyoshino, Nara.

A life size bronze statue was built in 1987 to commemorate the location where the last Japanese wolf, a young male, was killed by hunters in 1905. The memorial statue is located on the banks of the Takami River, about a 45-minute bus ride away from the closest subway station.**

The inscription below the statue is ニホンオオカミの像 - “statue of a Japanese wolf.” In Japan this subspecies is known simply as “nihon ookami,” literally ‘Japanese wolf.’ In English we call it the Honshū wolf (Canis lupus hodophilax) to differentiate it from the also extinct, but larger Hokkaidō wolf (Canis lupus hattai). In Japanese the Hokkaidō wolf is called Ezo wolf.

A stone at the site bears the haiku: 狼は亡び 木霊ハ存ふる (reading: オオカミはほろび、こだまはながらふる) - I believe this translates to “The wolf has perished, the spirit trembles.”

I wanted to leave a flower, but there were none for sale at the nearest station. Instead I happened to find some red spider lilies (higanbana) growing by the side of the road. From a symbolic point of view, it couldn’t have been a more perfect flower:

“They are associated with final goodbyes, and legend has it that these flowers grow wherever people part ways for good. In old Buddhist writings, the red spider lily is said to guide the dead through samsara, the cycle of rebirth.” [x]

It was a beautiful and serene place, and truly a moving experience.

When mocking outdated sculptures consider the time they were crafted in and that they were created by people through hard work

Unlike a majority of artists Czerkas was one of the few willing to update his work by adding feathers Of course not all of the Deinonychus sculptures received this updates but in most museums that feature his work you will encounter the feathered variant

He also created different poses for the same animal which is an incredible amount of work for any artist

And the detail is stunning to this day, if these sculptures were to be thrown away it would be a true shame

His non-maniraptoran theropods such as this Allosaurus still hold up amazingly well to this day

The Real ‘The Ghost And The Darkness’

In 1996 moviegoers’ evolutionary ancestral fear of humans being prey to an apex predator was put on display in the film ‘The Ghost and the Darkness’, a historical action horror film that starred Val Kilmer as Lt. Colonel John Henry Patterson. Kilmer’s character goes to Tsavo, Kenya to help a railroad company with a “Wild Life” problem where workers are being attacked by two Lions. After arriving and encountering the Lions himself, he soon discovers that these Lions are not normal and are bloodthirsty and go on a kill/eating spree. Towards the end of the film, Kilmer’s character gets ’s help from Michael Douglas’s character, Charles Remington, a professional large game hunter, and the two discover that the lions are killing for sport. Fast forward to the end, Kilmer solves the problem and the railway is complete.

As it was mentioned at the end of the film, the Lions of Tsavo can be seen today at the Field Museum in Chicago. Though the movie is pretty entertaining (I’m actually a fan of it) the historical part of the story is a little less dramatic as the film shows. The lions on display are named, the one standing is FMNH 23969 and the one crouching is FMNH 23970. Their appearance is odd for two reasons, the lions are indeed adult males but they’re Maneless, a feature that’s typical in the Lion population in Tsavo, and the lions for a long time after their deaths were used as carpets by Patterson himself. The process of making an animal into a carpet results in a lot of the skin being removed, so when the lions were put on display they had to use skins from other lions to patch them together.

In 1898 the English were building a rail bridge over the Tsavo River as part of a new railway connecting Uganda to the Indian Ocean. Unlike the film, Patterson was not brought in to help with the lion problem, Patterson was already at the work site, in short, he was in charge of the project. After the project started, the two lions came and their odd behavior began. Workers were pulled out of their tents at night and dragged away from camp and were eaten. This became a pattern that would repeat many times. Patterson dealt with the problem head on and helped the workers try to set up deterrents to keep the lions away. These did not work; the Lions still came and attacked. Because of this, many workers left the site forcing Paterson to actively go and hunt the lions. For a while it was a (big) cat and mouse game, Patterson set up traps, the Lions avoided them, he would ambush them but they escape.

Finally, Patterson was able to kill the first lion (FMNH 23970) on December 9th with two shots from a high powered rifle. The second lion (FMNH 23969) was killed December 29th after being shot nine times from three different rifles, all shot by Patterson. After killing the lions, work on the bridge resumed and it was finished in March of 1899 but the mystery of the Man-eaters of Tsavo still baffled Patterson and experts to this day, even after discoveries were made thanks to the skulls of the man-eaters.

When one looks at the skulls of the lions, you may notice something a bit off about both of them. FNHM 23969’s bottom right canine is broken but Patterson wrote that he struck one of the lions with his rifle when it tried to attack him. Then there’s FNHM 23970, he’s missing some bottom teeth which are common in some lions, they get kicked in the face by hoofed animals and get teeth knocked out but his canine and the bone tissue surrounding it’s lower teeth show signs of an abscessed tooth or severe infection in the roots of its teeth; he was in pain and could not bite hard.

This is the most common and accepted theory, one of two lions was incapable of killing its normal prey, lions strangle their prey by applying a strong bite on the throat of its prey but if you have a painful infection, it means you have to bite on something, “softer”. Recent analytical-studies of the Isotopic Signature of the two lions, scientists were able to figure out how many people were eaten by each lion and it’s estimated that both lions ate 35 workers, about 100 less than what Patterson recalled but these figures only mean those who were eaten, not just killed. FNHM 23969 ate 10.5 humans and FNHM 23970 (the one with the infected teeth) ate 24.2 humans. Further studies done on the later lion’s teeth looking at dental microwear texture have noticed that the wear on FNHM 23970’s teeth shows the same type of wear that is seen in captive lions who eat a “soft” diet and don’t bite on bones.

In theory, the strange behavior by the two lions is the result of possibly a perfect storm of circumstances. As mentioned above, the one lion losing the ability to kill larger prey, the time of year that most of the attacks seemed to have occurred, winter, or in Africa, the dry season. Lions can become desperate at this time as many large prey move on as water becomes scarce. Finally, a massive outbreak of Cattle Plague (Rinderpest) thinning out the number of natural prey. All these could have been the collective result of why these two lions acted the way they have, nature responding to nature, not some nefarious act carried out by a couple “rogues”.

I felt the need to make a post for these beautiful animals because every time I see a picture of them, it’s absolutely haunting and heart breaking.

The last living thylacine in captivity yawns at the Hobart Zoo. Thylacines were capable of opening their jaws as wide as 80 degrees. 

The thylacine, more popularly known as the Tasmanian tiger, was an apex predator in Australia and Tasmania before its extinction in the early 20th century.

Despite its superficial resemblance to a large dog, the thylacine was actually a marsupial, with no relation to canines — its doglike features emerged as it evolved to fill an ecological niche similar to wolves.

Instantly recognizable by its distinctive striped back, the thylacine also featured an abdominal pouch similar to a kangaroo’s.

Though the thylacine had vanished from the Australian mainland by the time of British colonization, small populations of the animal survived on the island of Tasmania.

Thylacines were rarely seen by Tasmanian settlers, but were increasingly blamed for the deaths of livestock, leading the government to establish bounties for their killing.

Their already meager numbers dwindled, and efforts to conserve the species were too little, too late. The last thylacine to be killed in the wild was shot by a hunter in 1930, and the last captive thylacine died at the Hobart Zoo in 1936.