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Hyraxes and Elephants and Africa

Sometimes you read things online that can't be true. Sometimes those things turn out to be true.

About a year ago I read that the hyrax is the closest living relative to the elephant. The hyrax is roughly the size of a domesticated rabbit - maybe smaller - and looks like a mix between a capybara and a rat. Here is its wiki page.

It's amazing. The genetic similarities (if you don't read the wiki page) are because they have similar testicle situations (great band name), their mammaries are patterned in a way that's similar to manatees and elephants, and their "tusks" come from the incisors (same as elephants) whereas almost all animals have "tusks" from their canine teeth. How can something that maxes out at about 10 pounds be nearest relative to something that weighs about 200 pounds at birth?

Science is amazing. And while I do want to explore how the above question can be answered, I'll do that on my own time or read about it on the internet. Instead of doing that here, I'm going to tell you about meeting a hyrax.

We went to Tanzania on a safari in November. It was bonkers. There were all kinds of animals and they were all incredible. But sometimes it's the things you least expect that stick with you. I'll always remember the baby lions, the elephants, the cheetahs, the giraffes - all the typical safari stuff - but I'll also always remember the picnic area in the Serengeti.

We stopped for an hour or so one day while our guide went to refuel and check on the car. He dropped us off at a "safe" picnic area which would limit any concerns about predators coming through, and it even had some educational signage and whatnot. As we walked around the opposite side of the shop and educational walkway, we saw this.



Just having a snooze on one of the picnic tables. There were plenty of others around, so we quickly identified the critters, but holy crap was that unexpected. They were everywhere.


And they were cute.


Did I mention they were everywhere?


They never actually got close enough that you could touch them, and I imagine that would be a bad idea even if it were possible. They probably carry some kind of disease and they were treated like rats by the workers. They were just...there. They'd get shooed off by brooms, shouted at a little, and generally treated as pests. Perhaps the weirdest thing was that they were willing to approach humans and actually would walk under a crowded picnic table, hoping for scraps and occasionally brushing against a leg. That would be kind of frightening, no?

They were really cool. They may have been more like a squirrel in the sense that they weren't really out in the open of the plains - we only saw them at the picnic area, near the people and thus near the leftovers. Seeing a baby lion was objectively cooler, but seeing a hyrax and wondering about how they could possibly be cousins to the elephant was much more thought-provoking.

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