The first of many oddities comes from looking at what its supposed to be based on its taxonomy,after all it looks like it could be anywhere and everywhere in the tree of mammal live,and it comes from basically the only group where it feels completely out of place compared to its exotic cousins,that actually cashed in the evolution points that they earned in the cruel game of spore that is live.

Lets look at the second of many images stolen from Wikipedia,in order,clockwise and ignoring our obsession of the day.

The first of the Paeungulata that we will be looking at today is the Arsinoitherium,convergent evolution gave it the shape and the horns of a rhino,but its closer to elephants and the scrimblo bimblo of today,because this is an extinct animal most of you are unfamiliar with i will go in great detail on it(i love doing that).

Unlike rhino horns,these aren’t made only of keratin,they are more similar to the horns in a bull,covered in keratin but mainly made out of a bone core.

their legs were specialized in moving across water and mud,they lived in coastal and humid forest of what is Africa and Arabia today.at a size of 1.7 M tall and 2.5 tons they were anatomically built in a similar way to an elephant,with very robust legs.

This animal lived during the boundary between the Eocene and the Oligocene before going the way of the dodo.

The next ones are elephants and sirenians,hopefully you went to kindergarten once and you know what an elephant is(imagine someone in 10000 years reads this)so i will say that sirenians are dugongs and manatees,marine mammals that grace the sea grass near the coast.

and then there is coney

The hyrax looks nothing like anything we just discussed,being more similar in size and shape to a rat or a wombat and with a a name that translates from Greek as shrew-mouse,but this is only if we look at the extant ones as the extinct were more similar to its cohorts,with the titanohyrax looking like a hippo rat.

The meme of these guys not expending their evolution points and looking like default mammals can be justified by the fact that they retain,or retrained,a lot of primitive characteristics like their lack of thermal regulation compared to other mammals.

Another curious fact is the mentions they have on the bible,the place where im getting the name of coney for them,they are not kosher to eat because the are “unclean”,ouch,they are also called smart too for living in the rocks so that’s better at least.

There is also a non zero chance of these guys giving name to Spain,even thou they only live in Africa and some areas of the middle east,as the name originates from the Phoenician I-Shpania,that translates to land of the hyraxes,probably because they thought that rabbits are funny looking hyraxes.

There are the rock hyrax,the bush hyrax and the tree hyrax,the rock and bush hyrax are unique species whereas the tree hyrax is a genus with four species,they are also the ugliest(derogatory).

They also have fascinating digestive systems,they have very interesting teeth,with two cute tusks coming out of their mouths,they also have multichambered stomachs,not so simple anymore huh?

So that’s all i have for today,I kinda wrote all of this in a single day because I hyperfixated on these guys for like 10 hours or so,I might write more of these on any animal that fascinates me but don’t expect a lot of these for now,Im busy.