Curated category
Tool-using mammals
- Humpback whaleMathurin Jacques Brisson first identified the humpback whale in his Regnum Animale of 1756. Georg Heinrich Borowski later converted this name to its Latin…
- CattleAround 10,500 years ago, wild aurochs began their transformation into the cattle we know today. This process started in central Anatolia and the Levant near…
- ElephantSixty million years ago, the earliest members of Proboscidea emerged in Africa. Eritherium weighed around 10 kilograms and stood less than half a meter tall.
- ChimpanzeeThe London Magazine published the first recorded use of the name chimpanzee in September 1738. A creature described as a mockman arrived from Guinea and was…
- Homo erectusIn 1893, Dutch scientist Eugène Dubois named a fossil Pithecanthropus erectus. He had found the skullcap and molar in Trinil, Java, during 1891.
- OrangutanIn 1631, Dutch physician Jacobus Bontius published an account describing a creature called orang-utan. He reported that local Malays claimed the ape could…
- HumanIn 2015, the United Nations estimated that there were 316,600 living centenarians worldwide. This number represents a tiny fraction of the global population…