Monday, January 26, 2009

Henry the Cranky Tuatara fathers children at 111

I haven't posted anything of interest to cryptozoologists for awhile, so here's a charming tuatara story I found in the Fortean Times' Breaking News section. I have been priviliged to see living tuatara, which are quite rare, mostly due to competition from introduced species on the New Zealand islands where they once flourished. Any increase in their number is good news...

4 comments:

junjun said...

Oh I watched this information on news here in Japan.
Tuatara means this kind of lizard in English ?
I heard the character of tuatara changed to be interested in other gender
since remove a tumour.
Yeah sounds interesting.

Allan MacInnis said...

Tuatara aren't really lizards - they're a distinct species that looks lizard-like, but has existed more or less unchanged since the time of the dinosaurs; they have no close genetic kin, are their own thing. "Tuatara," I imagine, is a Maori name - the New Zealand aboriginal people... I was really excited to see a tuatara during my trip to New Zealand, actually, but found the whole experience rather anti-climactic. The tuatara I saw - several young ones and a couple of adults - barely moved, just sat there in their enclosures looking like they might have been plastic toys...

junjun said...

Oh really ?
Sounds interesting.
Because Here in Japan all new medias call them Mukashi-Tokage.
Mukashi means old time and Tokage is a lizard.
This can be old time's lizard.
Maybe we know that they aren't biologically a lizard.
But they really similar to a lizard.
That why we call them Mukashi-Tokage in Japanese.
Thank you for telling me that there is no words to indicate "a lizard" in thier name of English.

Allan MacInnis said...

No worries - they look a lot like a lizard!

(By the way, if people are curious, "Junjun" was my best student in the Japanese high school where I taught from 1999 to 2002. He was very ambitious about learning English, and we hung out a bunch. He's my only student from that time that I remain in touch with!).