Here is some placeholder text about whales that I will fill in later. I'll also link to the Leviathan section of the Mythological Animals page I'm going to create. I'm also going to add in a bunch of pictures of whales and give them captions like "Big Boi", "Big ol' freakin' whale", and whatever else. Gonna need some diagrams on comparative size. Will add some fun facts on whales, links to the Whale Facts Twitter account, and I'll list some stuff about the following famous whales, fictional and real:
Blue 52—Blue 52 is a whale famous for it's unique song; no other whale recorded thus far (at least until about 2010, when a suspected second 52-hertz whale was recorded) sings at this unique frequency. This suggests the animal is either in some way disabled or a hybrid of two species--possibly both--and that it might be unable to communicate effectively with other whales. Which of course means humans have romanticized it; Blue 52 is often called "The World's Loneliest Whale", and has inspired books, movies, documentaries, songs or entire albums, and other art or tributes based around the idea of a lonely whale evoking feelings of isolation, alienation, unluckiness in love, or drawing comparisons to disability and misunderstood outcasts.
Even before the suspected second cetacean singer of 52-hertz frequencies was suggested, however, marine biologists have pointed out that this is just human beings projecting our own inner lives and experiences onto a wild marine mammal; although no individual animal has actually been observed and conclusively identified as the whale producing the unique songs, there isn't really evidence that other whales can't understand it or that it always travels alone, and if it does, that could be by choice.
Moby-Dick, duh, and his real-life origins
The whale that swallowed Pinnocchio had a name, right?
Find more famous real-life whales, but really big ones, not like orcas and stuff
Okay maybe that one female orca who's teaching the other orcas to sink yachts in Europe.
Hyenas too?
I do have a lot I can say about hyenas.
Giant squids? If you have whales, that could be a good segue.
It's basically just that one Animorphs book, though. Maybe make this a sub-section of the whale stuff? If you do, definitely link to a video of I Crush Everything, and then you can link to a section about the Kraken on the Mythological Animals page.
Are elephants too basic?
You know what, it's my website, I'll put elephants on it if I want to!
Elephants mourn their dead. They have elaborate behaviors of keeping vigil over recent corpses, which they'll cover with grass and flowers, often while rocking back-and-forth, keening, holding other mourning elephants in the group, and caressing the remains with their trunks. When they happen across old resting sites of other elephants, they will often perform similar behaviors, as if paying respects or tending a grave even if they don't seem to know who the long-gone elephant was.
They also have culture, just like whales! (And unlike your mom!) These three male African elephants had never had contact with this wildlife sanctuary personally but were known to associate with elephants who had. Somehow, even when other humans had tried to harm them, they understood that this place in particular would help them...and the key here is, they somehow learned this second-hand from the other elephants who had had contact with the refuge before. There are stories all over the Internet of elephants seeking out humans for help, even when other humans have caused the danger. They're either taking chances that *these* humans are "some of the good ones", or have some way of communicating or discerning which humans are more likely to help them (although there's likely an element of both chance and taking an informed risk involved).
This actually poses a problem for attempts to resurrect mammoths (seriously, there is an actual attempt right now, because Jeff Goldblum taught these people nothing). Gestating a mammoth to birth would require at least a modified elephant reproductive system, but using elephants as surrogates to birth and raise mammoths is more complicated than even that. Because elephants learn how to be elephants from their family/herd, this implies that mammoths would too, and the first generation of mammoths would have to learn mammoth-hood from...elephants. And there are enough differences--like size, for one thing--that the lack of any extant mammoths to learn from would result in a generation of very confused resurrected pachyderms who don't know how to fill the ecological niche these wannabe Frankensteins hope they will.
But we'll probably go through with it anyway, because rich people need unnecessary, bad ideas to spend their money on instead of potentially helping provide solutions to problems we've already identified. They wouldn't be mad scientists without "eccentric billionaire" funding!
Scientists wondered for years how herds communicate across huge distances...then we discovered they make very deep sounds, too deep for our hearing range (but which we can sometimes feel as vibrations in the ground when standing very near them), which can travel across the ground for miles! Elephants have wide, sensitive, padded feet, which of course are required for cushioning the movement of such a huge animal, but which they also use to pick up and interpret these vibrations in order to communicate over long distances while migrating.
Herds will raid human villages (reports are frequent in India and Tanzania, but I also found stories in Uganda, Kenya, and Thailand), bust into the granaries and barns, and eat the stored grain and fruits. They also like to get drunk! They'll crush barrels of beer or pots of mahua into their mouths, then stomp haphazardly around the village, destroying crops and whatever else gets in their way while the villagers try to chase them away with torches. Ain't no kegger like an elephant kegger!
