Animals Named After Mythical Creatures

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Name Explain

Күн бұрын

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@NameExplain Ай бұрын

Which mythical creature would you like as a pet?

@ManiacVF Ай бұрын

The big turtle that carries the world

@pastedtomato Ай бұрын

A Strix, and use it against my enemies

@Carlos-bz5oo Ай бұрын

A gambozino

@tinahs8269 Ай бұрын

Dragon

@mingfanzhang4600 Ай бұрын

😊

@lozeldatkm Ай бұрын

Often logs would be thrown on a fire, and lizards such as salamanders would come running out of them as if they were being birthed from the flames. So that's where that link to mythology comes from.

@jorgelotr3752 Ай бұрын

Salamanders are not lizards. They are amphybians.

@SoldadoCatolico Ай бұрын

@@jorgelotr3752 ☝️🤓

@kittyprydekissme Ай бұрын

Medusa is another name for jellyfish. A hydra is a small creature similar to a coral polyp. An amphisbaena is a subterranean offshoot of the lizard family with no legs. A chimera is a sea creature similar to sharks and rays. Basilisk lizard, vampire bat, sphinx moth, unicorn beetle, fairy tern,....

@undrhil Ай бұрын

I came to the comments to bring up basilisk lizards

@kittyprydekissme Ай бұрын

@@undrhil I'm embarrassed because I forgot to mention harpy eagles.

@YunxiaoChu Ай бұрын

Didn’t know amphisbaenians were named after mythology

@saisamsuri Ай бұрын

There's also the manticora, a type of tiger beetle named after manticores. The manticoras themselves are semi-mythical in African folklore. Manticores in ASOIAF seem to be inspired by them.

@jorgelotr3752 Ай бұрын

1:46 it was not legendary, it just got extinct in the early 17th century, if I'm not wrong. It was an endemic equine whose description matches quite well what your regular wild equine looks like (mostly brown coat with a black stripe on the shoulders), but it was distinct from wild donkeys and wild horse-likes. The issue here is that the name "zebra" was given to the animals that lived in South Africa, while the group as a whole received the local name "quagga", but at some point, they switched (also, they were named "zebras" because they looked a bit like the *female* zebros, meaning they had to have seen some kind of depiction of males and females, if not the animals themselves). The main reason some people believe it to be just a fairytale, despite the written record showcasing them in a more mundane way than local mythical creatures (including consistent detailed descriptions, hunts and pelts, pest extermination requests, and concerns upon population reduction), is because the places they last lived in, where they left a mark in place names, speak languages (Portuguese, Galician, Leonese...) where the word for "holly" is either "acebro" or "acivro", and some places names got switched from one to the other quite easily ("zebro territory" "holly grove"), not to mention that most if not all of those places are suboptimal to leave some kind of fossil record (highly acidic soil+high humidity). 6:48 unless English somehow managed to backtrack, it should come from Latin _orca_ instead (still same meaning of "sea monster"), which in turn comes from _Orcus,_ the Latin name of the etruscan god of the Underworld (as well as the Underworld itself), which they later conflated with Pluto and their original Dis Pater (and later with greek Hades):

@TonboIV Ай бұрын

7:45 Yes worms boring is incredibly important to our planet.

@spacesandwich5593 Ай бұрын

Underrated comment

@sydhenderson6753 Ай бұрын

The chimera was a mythical monster killed by Bellerophon and it gave its name to a clade of relatives of sharks and rays. The connection are that both look like they're cobbled together from several different animals. Cetus (ketos in Greek) is the sea-monster from the Andromeda myth. It lends its name to the cetacea, i.e. whales and their close relatives. Draco, from the Latin word for dragon, is a genus of flying lizard as well as a type of Malfoy. Of course, there are hundreds of these. The fearsome cyclops Polyphemus gave his name to a genus of water fleas. Another genus of water fleas is Cyclops. Quite a comedown.

@sydhenderson6753 Ай бұрын

Echidnas are rather cute. I like to think an alternate explanation for their name is true, that it comes from an Ancient Greek word for hedgehog, but that's probably wishful thinking.

@pedromenchik1961 Ай бұрын

In Portuguese, there's a type of jellyfish called Medusa

@jorgelotr3752 Ай бұрын

In Spanish, all jellyfish are medusas.

@xezmakorewarriah Ай бұрын

@@jorgelotr3752same in russian!!!

@YunxiaoChu Ай бұрын

Cool

@alexiswelsh5821 Ай бұрын

I heard that the name “killer whale” is a mistranslation of “whale killer”, because whoever translated it didn’t know how Spanish and French grammar worked

@samatri0112 Ай бұрын

this makes "slow worm" much more sense

@KlaxontheImpailr 29 күн бұрын

5:28 unless you're a mouse of course.

@TonboIV Ай бұрын

1:24 Zebras are not horses. They are both in the same genus: equus, but so are asses and donkeys, none of which are horses.

@tinahs8269 Ай бұрын

I'm surprised you didn't mention George RR Martin in the Wyrms segment ..he also uses that word, specifically mentioning firewyrms, fire breathing pink things that crawl around under volcanos, being mated to winged creatures called Wyverns to make fire breathing Dragons.

@SuprousOxide Ай бұрын

In D&D very old dragons are called Great Wyrms, even ones with legs and wings. I always assumed the etymology went the other way, with long snakelike dragons being compared to worms...

@wendychavez5348 21 күн бұрын

Some of this, I knew. Much of it is a surprise. Thanks for always teaching me something!

@amesstarline5482 Ай бұрын

2:56 So you're saying the Applin line is not just a pun, but etymologically connected.

@nellidivina5280 Ай бұрын

1:48, name explain, what mythical creature did you say?

@nickimontie Ай бұрын

Great topic! I never knew this!!

@thewetzelsixx9009 Ай бұрын

That's the most adorable lemur I've ever seen. Lol.

@Lunar994 Ай бұрын

Not to mention echidnas having a four-head ding dong

@tinahs8269 Ай бұрын

Orcs is being used by people in or from ukraine as a slang term for russian troops...so perhaps the black sea fleet is a bunch of orcas?

@AncTreat5358 Ай бұрын

When you were covering strix, I thought you going to take it towards harpies. :)

@SuryaBudimansyah Ай бұрын

No mention of Komodo dragons?

@jordanhamann9123 Ай бұрын

Do we actually have evidence that Manatees ever pull the "Mermaid Pose" (head and tail out of the water at the same time) in the wild? They always seem more like floating refrigerators and too bulky to pull that move. Not that I believe in mermaids, I'm just curious.

@wendychavez5348 21 күн бұрын

I absolutely believe in mermaids--I actually was one in another lifetime! Manatees really don't seem capable of using that pose, though they're more graceful in open water than on land or in a zoo environment. Maybe an ancient sailor saw one caught in a whirlpool & didn't understand what he was seeing?