Akimushkin once upon a time lived a squirrel to read. Igor Akimushkin - once upon a time there was a bear
Igor Ivanovich Akimushkin
Once upon a time there was a bear
A bear cub was born in winter in a den - a warm, cozy hole under an inverted spruce tree. The den was covered on all sides with coniferous branches and moss. The little bear cub was born - the size of a mitten, and weighed only half a kilogram.
The first thing he remembered was something wet, but warm, licking him. He crawled towards him. The heavy beast that was licking him turned so that the baby was directly in front of the nipple. The little bear clung to the nipple and, smacking with impatience, began to suck the milk.
This is how the little bear lived: he ate, slept, sucked again, slept again in his mother’s warmth.
He was still completely blind: his eyes opened only a month after birth. When the newborn cub became cold and began to tremble, the mother covered the baby with her front paws and began to breathe hotly on him to warm him up.
Three months passed quickly - spring approached. One day, waking up, the bear cub, to his surprise, discovered another animal in the den, similar to his mother, but smaller than her. It was his older sister. Last summer, the bear drove away all the grown cubs and kept only one with her. The two of them lay down in the den.
Why did you leave it?
And then, so that there is someone to help care for the cubs that will be born in the den in winter. The older bear cub is called a nurse. Because he cares for newborns, nurtures them, like a good nanny.
...Spring is still early - April. There is still a lot of snow in the forest along the spruce forests, pine forests, and gullies. Raw, grainy, lies tightly.
When the mother bear sensed the smells of spring, she broke through the roof of her sleeping hole and climbed out into the light. And after the darkness of the den, the light struck her eyes with extraordinary brightness. With her sensitive nose, the bear sniffed the spirit from the damp earth, from the swollen buds, from the melted snow, from the pine trees that generously exuded resin.
It's time... It's time to leave the winter shelter. It's time to walk through the forest and collect food.
And so she went, collapsing immediately into a snowdrift that the blizzard had swept up during the winter near the turnout. The nurse immediately came out of the den behind her, and the little bear cub whined pitifully: he had not overcome the obstacle. Then the pestun returned to the pit and pulled him out by the collar with his teeth.
The spruce forest rustles with needles, the wind rustles in the branches. Our bears got out of the forest and into the black forest. The snow has almost completely melted here. The earth became foggy under the steamy warmth of the sun.
The mother bear was not idle, she was in charge everywhere: she would pull out snags, some stones, turn over slabs. The beast has great strength. The wind fell the tree to the ground, the bear walked around it, sniffed under the trunk what the earth smelled like there. Suddenly she grabbed a pine tree and moved it from its place like a light log. Now the nurse poked his nose into that bed sore and scraped the ground with his claws: maybe there was some small thing alive to eat. An example for the baby! He also began to dig the ground with his new claws.
The bear has lost weight over the winter, is hungry, chews and gnaws everything that is green, that is alive, scurrying around in the spring. The cubs keep up with her and imitate her in everything. Last year's pine nuts and acorns are being collected.
The anthill is a particularly pleasant find. They dug it all up and scattered it far around. The bear licked her paws, and the cubs, looking at her, did the same. Then they shoved their paws into the very vanity of the ants. Instantly the paws turned black from the ants that rushed at them in droves. Here the bears licked the ants off their paws, ate them and reached for a new portion.
They ate a lot of ants, but did not feel full. The bear took the children to the moss swamps to pick cranberries.
They walked as usual: the mother was in front, the little bear cub was behind her, and the nurse was behind. The swamps have long since been freed from snow and are red with red berries - last year's cranberries. The mother bear and cubs raked up whole clumps with their paws and put them in their mouths, swallowed the juicy berries and threw away the moss. The sun had already risen high - the mother bear and her cubs went to rest: they climbed into the very thicket - the chapyga. We slept until late in the evening. The dawn was already fading in the west when the mother of her children led her to a field at the edge of the forest: there the winter crops were growing green. They ate this greenery until the morning, grazing like cows in a meadow.
The pike went to the floods to spawn, and the bear went there too. She sat down by the water and looked at it. The cubs also lay down nearby and became quiet. How long did they wait - no one watched the clock; But the bear spotted a large fish not far from the shore and suddenly jumped on it with a noisy splash with all four paws, like a fox on a mouse. The pike did not escape from the bear's claws. The loot is important. The whole family feasted.
Again noon approached, and the bears went to bed again. We slept until dawn.
One day, a bear and her children were walking early in the morning, well-fed and happy, and came across a tree broken by a storm, whose trunk was split. The bear stopped near him. She came closer to the trunk, grabbed a chip of wood with her paw, pulled it down and let go. A chip of wood hit the trunk - the trunk rattled and hummed, vibrating. Once again she took the chipped wood to the side and, releasing it, hit the trunk - a rumble went through the forest. This is music for bears. They love her: they bow their heads here and there to one side, listening to how far the loud echo carries the roar they make through the surrounding forests.
Bears love different things. For example, throwing stones and snags from a steep slope. And they themselves look down with curiosity at how they roll and what noise it makes.
Summer passed quickly in business and fun. Autumn has begun to threaten with cold. It's time for bears to think about winter. The main thing is to choose a place for the den: remote, difficult to pass. There, usually under the roots of a fallen tree, bears dig a hole. Then the bed is prepared - from moss, from bark torn from trees. Others cover the pit with brushwood, branches, and moss. Such a den, as hunters say, has “sky.” And the hole in such a “sky” - an outlet - is called a “berloch brow”.
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A bear cub was born in winter in a den - a warm, cozy hole under an inverted spruce tree. The den was covered on all sides with coniferous branches and moss. The little bear cub was born - the size of a mitten, and weighed only half a kilogram.
The first thing he remembered was something wet, but warm, licking him. He crawled towards him. The heavy beast that was licking him turned so that the baby was directly in front of the nipple. The little bear clung to the nipple and, smacking with impatience, began to suck the milk. This is how the little bear lived: he ate, slept, sucked again, slept again in his mother’s warmth. He was still completely blind: his eyes opened only a month after birth. When the newborn cub became cold and began to tremble, the mother covered the baby with her front paws and began to breathe hotly on him to warm him up.
Three months passed quickly - spring approached. One day, waking up, the bear cub, to his surprise, discovered another animal in the den, similar to his mother, but smaller than her. It was his older sister. Last summer, the bear drove away all the grown cubs and kept only one with her. The two of them lay down in the den.
Why did you leave it?
And then, so that there is someone to help care for the cubs that will be born in the den in winter. The older bear cub is called a nurse. Because he cares for newborns, nurtures them, like a good nanny.
...Spring is still early - April. There is still a lot of snow in the forest along the spruce forests, pine forests, and gullies. Raw, grainy, lies tightly.
When the mother bear smelled the smells of spring, she broke through the roof of her sleeping hole and climbed out into the light. And after the darkness of the den, the light struck her eyes with extraordinary brightness. With her sensitive nose, the bear sniffed the spirit from the damp earth, from the swollen buds, from the melted snow, from the pine trees that generously exuded resin.
It's time... It's time to leave the winter shelter. It's time to walk through the forest and collect food.
And so she went, collapsing immediately into a snowdrift that the blizzard had swept up during the winter near the turnout. The nurse immediately came out of the den behind her, and the little bear cub whined pitifully: he had not overcome the obstacle. Then the pestun returned to the pit and pulled him out by the collar with his teeth.
The spruce forest rustles with needles, the wind rustles in the branches. Our bears got out of the forest and into the black forest. The snow has almost completely melted here. The earth became foggy under the steamy warmth of the sun.
The mother bear was not idle, she was in charge everywhere: she would pull out snags, some stones, turn over slabs. The beast has great strength. The wind fell the tree to the ground, the bear walked around it, sniffed under the trunk what the earth smelled like there. Suddenly she grabbed a pine tree and moved it from its place like a light log. Now the nurse poked his nose into that bedsore and scraped the ground with his claws: maybe there was some small thing alive to eat. An example for the baby! He also began to dig the ground with his new claws.
The bear has lost weight over the winter, is hungry, chews and gnaws everything that is green, that is alive, scurrying around in the spring. The cubs keep up with her and imitate her in everything. Last year's pine nuts and acorns are being collected.
The anthill is a particularly pleasant find. They dug it all up and scattered it far around. The bear licked her paws, and the cubs, looking at her, did the same. Then they shoved their paws into the very vanity of the ants. Instantly, the paws turned black from the Ants, who rushed at them in crowds. Here the bears licked the Ants off their paws, ate them and reached for a new portion.
They ate a lot of Ants, but did not become full. The bear took the children to the moss swamps to pick cranberries.
They walked as usual: the mother was in front, the little bear cub was behind her, and the nurse was behind. The swamps have long since been freed from snow and are red with red berries - last year's cranberries. The mother bear and cubs raked up whole clumps with their paws and put them in their mouths, swallowed the juicy berries and threw away the moss. The sun had already risen high - the mother bear and her cubs went to rest: they climbed into the very thicket of the chapyga. We slept until late in the evening. The dawn was already fading in the west when the mother of her children led her children to a field at the edge of the forest: there the winter crops were growing green. They ate this greenery until the morning, grazing like cows in a meadow.
The pike went to the floods to spawn, and the bear went there too. She sat down by the water and looked at it. The cubs also lay down nearby and became quiet. How long did they wait - no one watched the clock; But the bear spotted a large fish not far from the shore and suddenly jumped on it with a noisy splash with all four paws, like a fox on a mouse. The pike did not escape from the bear's claws. The loot is important. The whole family feasted.
Igor Ivanovich Akimushkin (May 1, 1929, Moscow - 1993) - writer, biologist, is the author of popular science books about the life of animals.
Born in Moscow in the family of an engineer. Graduated from the Faculty of Biology and Soil Sciences of Moscow State University (1952). Published since 1956.
Author of popular science books about the life of animals: “Traces of Unseen Beasts”, “The Path of Legends”, “Primates of the Sea”, “The Tragedy of Wild Animals”, etc. Akimushkin’s focus is on current issues of development, conservation and study of the animal world, behavioral research and the psyche of animals. He wrote not only books for children and youth; but also scripts for popular science films. A number of Akimushkin’s works have been translated into foreign languages. His most famous work is the book “Animal World”.
“The World of Animals” is the most famous work of Igor Ivanovich Akimushkin, which has gone through several reprints. They summarize a huge amount of scientific material, use a more modern classification scheme for the animal world, many different facts from the life of animals, birds, fish, insects and reptiles, beautiful illustrations, photographs, funny stories and legends, incidents from life and notes from an observer-naturalist.
Books (22)
Entertaining biology
Why, eating the same food, breathing the same air, living in approximately the same conditions, do completely different animals and plants develop?
How does a person, for example, emerge from a single cell? When, where and how did life originate on Earth? How did man appear on Earth?
Of course, everyone has thought about these and many other similar questions more than once.
This book will not only answer all these questions in an entertaining way, but will also tell you about many wonderful and sometimes unexpected discoveries in biology.
Vanished World
In this book, candidate of biological sciences and writer Igor Akimushkin talks about the development of the animal world.
It talks about the first vertebrates, the kingdom of dinosaurs, ichthyosaurs, flying lizards, Archeopteryx, mammoths and woolly rhinoceroses. The book ends with a story about primates.
Who flies without wings
“I’ll tell you, guys, riddles. The riddles are not simple. Those who love and know animals will guess them faster than anyone else. Because these riddles are zoological: about birds and animals, about fish and insects. And if you don’t guess, it doesn’t matter. Not everyone You know the animals. There are so many of them on earth - more than a million different species!
Read the stories and find out what strange creatures there are in the world, what amazing adaptations animals have."
The book “Where and How?” about restless animals, about eternal wanderers, four-legged, winged, sea creatures, about where they come from and where they wander, fly, swim and how they find their way. People have long been concerned about the inexplicable “intuition” of animals, their “supernatural” (so it seemed to many) instinct - a “sixth sense” that helps them accurately navigate the world around them, the ability to see the invisible, hear the inaudible.
Many of these secrets have been unraveled by science. Amazing “sixth senses” have been discovered in nature: echo sounders and radars, Polaroids and physiological chronometers, solar compasses and intricate “choreographic” methods of transmitting information discovered in bees.
Until recently, the mere suggestion that this was possible would have been considered pure fantasy. And yet this is really possible, it exists. It has been proven.
Animal world. Stories about animals
The first book of “The World of Animals” tells about seven orders of the class of mammals: cloacal, marsupial, insectivorous, six-winged, carnivorous, equid and ungulate.
Stories about the platypus, echidna, kangaroo, hedgehogs, wolves, foxes, bears, leopards, rhinoceroses, hippopotamus, gazelles and many other well-known and rare mammals.
Animal world. Stories about insects
When spring comes, followed by summer, we see insects everywhere.
Their vital energy, abundance of colors and shapes amaze and delight. And although the lifestyle of these animals is extremely interesting, and their instincts are complex and varied, there are surprisingly few nerve cells in their ganglia.
Animal world. Bird Stories
Birds, birds, birds... Hummingbirds and ostriches... Birds of the forest, field, desert, mountain, aquatic, cave, predatory and peaceful, singing and dumb...
Who flies better than a bird? Nobody. Twice a year, Arctic terns fly up to 20 thousand kilometers - from pole to pole. There are birds that, soaring in the sky, rarely sit on the ground and even sleep in the air. There are wingless birds that fly no better than a turtle.
Birds are everywhere. Both at the pole and in the tropics. There are sixty million of them in Finland. In England, perhaps two hundred million, all over the world - a hundred billion!
Invisible threads of nature
In the book “Invisible Threads of Nature,” the famous Soviet writer and popularizer of science I. Akimushkin shows in a fascinating way how closely intertwined the threads of life are in the biosphere; By “pulling out” one of them, we risk destroying the entire fabric of the biological community.
And if at times it seems that such destruction is small, this is a deep misconception. Small destructions in nature can cause a whole chain reaction that will lead to the impoverishment of the Earth. When talking about the possibilities of such a tragedy, the author always points out the means to prevent it.
About the wolf and wolves
Previously, man looked at all predators as his worst enemies and exterminated them without pity. But science has proven that predators in the life of nature are not only useful, but simply necessary: as orderlies and breeders who improve the tribe of non-predatory animals, because predators destroy primarily the sick and weak, poorly adapted, carrying various hereditary vices and defects.
Therefore, in many countries the law now protects against excessive extermination of predators. But old traditions and prejudices against wild animals are still alive among people. The fate of wolves is especially tragic: almost everywhere they are killed - without pity, without remorse and with a naive awareness of the usefulness of this harmful deed.
Discovery of the sixth sense
The brochure contains a lot of facts and observations that the general reader is not familiar with, but which will give him a scientifically based answer to a number of perplexing questions related to life on Earth.
Freaks of nature
The book by the famous science popularizer, scientist and writer Igor Akimushkin, is dedicated to unusual and sometimes paradoxical phenomena in the lifestyle and habits of the animal kingdom of nature.
Particular attention is paid to rare and endangered animals that need to be protected. A separate chapter tells about the amazing phenomena of the plant world of the Earth.
Igor Akimushkin
Animal World Volume 1
In 1961, our publishing house published Igor Akimushkin’s first book, “The Path of Legends,” which gained great popularity among readers.
His other books also did not remain in stores. “Traces of Unseen Animals”, “Primates of the Sea”, “And the Crocodile Has Friends”, “Where and How?”, “The Tragedy of Wild Animals”, “Entertaining Biology” - many readers know these titles.
These books tell about the amazing world of nature, about the wonders that await us beyond the threshold of our home, about the latest discoveries in biology. The story is simple and interesting.
After graduating from the Faculty of Biology of Moscow University, Igor Akimushkin worked for some time at the Institute of Oceanology of the USSR Academy of Sciences. He defended his dissertation and published a monograph on cephalopods of the seas of the USSR.
Now Igor Akimushkin writes books about animals. This is not a monograph or even a popular science review of systematic groups of the animal kingdom in the spirit of classical publications, but a book for reading. Their main content is stories about animal behavior. Morphology and taxonomy will be given little space, but animal behavior and zoopsychology will be given a lot of space.
Reader! I hope you find this book well received! This book is the first of five planned. I decided to start the story with mammals.
And please don’t be surprised by such blatant “conceit.” This is not dictated by self-confidence. No. Now that what is written is “you can’t cut it out with an axe,” I am worried that somewhere a very important idea is not expressed clearly enough, in another place there is no necessary fact at all, and in a third... Well, there’s nothing you can do to help.
Still, I hope. Because the subject of the book is Nature, and the love for it, I know, is wider and more powerful every day.
People have always loved trees, grass, flowers, animals, birds. But before, love seemed to be dozing, lulled by the consciousness of the inexhaustibility of the surrounding wealth. Now, when the growth of cities is increasingly oppressing the forests, and we, once in these forests, dream in vain of meeting a bear, wolf, deer, lynx and even a hare, our great love for Nature has awakened. She is awakened by an equally strong feeling - responsibility. Responsibility for ensuring that animals and birds live and prosper, that fish grow fat, that leaves flutter on the branches, that flowers bloom.
A difficult task faces humanity. And we must honestly admit: our century, glorious for the grandiose achievements of civilization, turned out to be unprepared for solving it. People, of course, got down to business. National parks, nature reserves, reserves - all this already exists. A lot of work is being done to acclimatize and protect animals.
But, for example, this happens. In California, in one picturesque corner near a beautiful lake, the all-powerful guardians of nature, in order to achieve complete harmony in the joys of tourism, destroyed the harmless midges that were spoiling the landscape. It was a serious operation, using helicopters and strong chemical agents. And successful. And after the midges, both the fish and the birds soon disappeared from the lake. In other parts of the world, annoying ants were exterminated. The result is a forest disaster. Now there is the best gift for a farmer - a bag of ants!
There are many such examples. They are all around us, we have all heard about them and rightly blush, because their cause is shameful lack of education. It is we, the people of the 20th century, who create miracles of technology, who at every step show ignorance of the simple mechanism of nature! Moreover, carried away by our miracles, we even forgot the names of many animals and birds - folk names that were previously self-explanatory. For example, peasants and hunters did not confuse the buzzard with the kite before; they knew the mints, pliskas, bluethroats, merlins, chepuras, various warblers and warblers, shrews, pine and stone martens, etc., etc. And now how many of us were not interested in this specifically, do they know who we are talking about?!
The ancients said: “Nomina si nescis peril et cocnitio rerum.” This means (roughly): “Without names there is no knowledge.” There is deep wisdom in this phrase. And it is very gratifying that it has again become modern, and not only in application to physics and chemistry, but also to biology, botany, and zoology.
I am happy (and sad, of course) when I hear in a bookstore that I am too late to buy a recently published book about animals, it has already sold out, such goods cannot stay around! And how can one not be happy for those unknown people (there are at least one hundred thousand of them - this is the circulation of the new product), people who rushed to know. And having learned, help.
Animals, or mammals, are a class of the animal kingdom (and a type of vertebrates), which in its highest evolutionary vicissitudes produced man. The very name of the class - mammals - contains the main and, perhaps, exhaustive characteristic of the main quality, the basic principle of difference from others in the animal kingdom.
Dressed in wool is another popular characteristic of this class. However, some clarification is needed here. If there are no animals that do not feed their babies with milk, then there are many animals that are not dressed in wool.
Whales, for example, have few hairs on their bodies—more precisely, on their faces: the bowhead whale has 250, the fin whale has 60, and dolphins have no more than eight. Elephants, rhinoceroses, hippos, and sirens have some hair. There are even rodents that are almost completely hairless: the African mole rat farum, or Heterocephalus glaber.
But hair loss is a secondary phenomenon; initially, all mammals were quite richly furred. Wool, covering the body, retains heat, which is produced by special physiological mechanisms. These internal “thermal power plants”, which evolution endowed with the ancestors of animals and all their descendants, turned out to be an excellent adaptation, reliable protection from the cold and vagaries of the weather, and helped to survive where cold-blooded reptiles dependent on the sun’s heat—the ancestors of animals—perished. However, there was a danger of excessive overheating of the body insulated from the weather. Cooling devices were required. Some animals have their own, special methods of heat transfer. For example, seals with thick blubber under their skin have areas on the body where the layer of blubber is thin - a kind of vent for removing excess heat. In a dog, as you know, the tongue and oral cavity are the main heat-removing system. The muskrat has a tail; elephants and other animals have ears abundantly supplied with hot blood. But the main cooling mechanism for most animals, which originally emerged in the struggle for existence, is the sweat glands.
From the sweat glands, it is believed that mammary glands later developed - the main thing that distinguishes all animals from non-animals. So this main fundamental property of them follows (historically and logically) from a quality partially lost by some of them - a body dressed in wool.
The first animals appeared on the planet approximately one hundred and fifty million years ago (according to some researchers, even earlier). But in that era, everywhere on Earth, in water, in air and on land, reptiles, that is, reptiles, dominated: various kinds of dinosaurs, pterodactyls, ichthyosaurs and other toothy, large and small monsters from the class to which crocodiles, snakes and turtles. The animals themselves descended from a special group of reptiles (birds too, but from a different group).
Millions of seventy years ago there was a mysterious and rapid extinction of entire clans of reptiles. Then all the dinosaurs died (for reasons more likely genetic than external). The rapid development of mammals began. New forms of life arose everywhere on the planet. This era of the flourishing of new life is called the Tertiary period of the Cenozoic era. In addition to oviparous and marsupial animals, animals of a higher order also appeared - placentals. During pregnancy, the females of these animals form a special organ in the uterus - the placenta - which provides a reliable transmission system, so to speak, between the fetus and the mother carrying it. Through the placenta, the fetus receives the oxygen and nutrition it needs for breathing from the mother's blood and removes waste products.
Igor Akimushkin
Animal World Volume 1
In 1961, our publishing house published Igor Akimushkin’s first book, “The Path of Legends,” which gained great popularity among readers.
His other books also did not remain in stores. “Traces of Unseen Animals”, “Primates of the Sea”, “And the Crocodile Has Friends”, “Where and How?”, “The Tragedy of Wild Animals”, “Entertaining Biology” - many readers know these titles.
These books tell about the amazing world of nature, about the wonders that await us beyond the threshold of our home, about the latest discoveries in biology. The story is simple and interesting.
After graduating from the Faculty of Biology of Moscow University, Igor Akimushkin worked for some time at the Institute of Oceanology of the USSR Academy of Sciences. He defended his dissertation and published a monograph on cephalopods of the seas of the USSR.
Now Igor Akimushkin writes books about animals. This is not a monograph or even a popular science review of systematic groups of the animal kingdom in the spirit of classical publications, but a book for reading. Their main content is stories about animal behavior. Morphology and taxonomy will be given little space, but animal behavior and zoopsychology will be given a lot of space.
Reader! I hope you find this book well received! This book is the first of five planned. I decided to start the story with mammals.
And please don’t be surprised by such blatant “conceit.” This is not dictated by self-confidence. No. Now that what is written is “you can’t cut it out with an axe,” I am worried that somewhere a very important idea is not expressed clearly enough, in another place there is no necessary fact at all, and in a third... Well, there’s nothing you can do to help.
Still, I hope. Because the subject of the book is Nature, and the love for it, I know, is wider and more powerful every day.
People have always loved trees, grass, flowers, animals, birds. But before, love seemed to be dozing, lulled by the consciousness of the inexhaustibility of the surrounding wealth. Now, when the growth of cities is increasingly oppressing the forests, and we, once in these forests, dream in vain of meeting a bear, wolf, deer, lynx and even a hare, our great love for Nature has awakened. She is awakened by an equally strong feeling - responsibility. Responsibility for ensuring that animals and birds live and prosper, that fish grow fat, that leaves flutter on the branches, that flowers bloom.
A difficult task faces humanity. And we must honestly admit: our century, glorious for the grandiose achievements of civilization, turned out to be unprepared for solving it. People, of course, got down to business. National parks, nature reserves, reserves - all this already exists. A lot of work is being done to acclimatize and protect animals.
But, for example, this happens. In California, in one picturesque corner near a beautiful lake, the all-powerful guardians of nature, in order to achieve complete harmony in the joys of tourism, destroyed the harmless midges that were spoiling the landscape. It was a serious operation, using helicopters and strong chemical agents. And successful. And after the midges, both the fish and the birds soon disappeared from the lake. In other parts of the world, annoying ants were exterminated. The result is a forest disaster. Now there is the best gift for a farmer - a bag of ants!
There are many such examples. They are all around us, we have all heard about them and rightly blush, because their cause is shameful lack of education. It is we, the people of the 20th century, who create miracles of technology, who at every step show ignorance of the simple mechanism of nature! Moreover, carried away by our miracles, we even forgot the names of many animals and birds - folk names that were previously self-explanatory. For example, peasants and hunters did not confuse the buzzard with the kite before; they knew the mints, pliskas, bluethroats, merlins, chepuras, various warblers and warblers, shrews, pine and stone martens, etc., etc. And now how many of us were not interested in this specifically, do they know who we are talking about?!
The ancients said: “Nomina si nescis peril et cocnitio rerum.” This means (roughly): “Without names there is no knowledge.” There is deep wisdom in this phrase. And it is very gratifying that it has again become modern, and not only in application to physics and chemistry, but also to biology, botany, and zoology.
I am happy (and sad, of course) when I hear in a bookstore that I am too late to buy a recently published book about animals, it has already sold out, such goods cannot stay around! And how can one not be happy for those unknown people (there are at least one hundred thousand of them - this is the circulation of the new product), people who rushed to know. And having learned, help.
Animals, or mammals, are a class of the animal kingdom (and a type of vertebrates), which in its highest evolutionary vicissitudes produced man. The very name of the class - mammals - contains the main and, perhaps, exhaustive characteristic of the main quality, the basic principle of difference from others in the animal kingdom.
Dressed in wool is another popular characteristic of this class. However, some clarification is needed here. If there are no animals that do not feed their babies with milk, then there are many animals that are not dressed in wool.
Whales, for example, have few hairs on their bodies—more precisely, on their faces: the bowhead whale has 250, the fin whale has 60, and dolphins have no more than eight. Elephants, rhinoceroses, hippos, and sirens have some hair. There are even rodents that are almost completely hairless: the African mole rat farum, or Heterocephalus glaber.
But hair loss is a secondary phenomenon; initially, all mammals were quite richly furred. Wool, covering the body, retains heat, which is produced by special physiological mechanisms. These internal “thermal power plants”, which evolution endowed with the ancestors of animals and all their descendants, turned out to be an excellent adaptation, reliable protection from the cold and vagaries of the weather, and helped to survive where cold-blooded reptiles dependent on the sun’s heat—the ancestors of animals—perished. However, there was a danger of excessive overheating of the body insulated from the weather. Cooling devices were required. Some animals have their own, special methods of heat transfer. For example, seals with thick blubber under their skin have areas on the body where the layer of blubber is thin - a kind of vent for removing excess heat. In a dog, as you know, the tongue and oral cavity are the main heat-removing system. The muskrat has a tail; elephants and other animals have ears abundantly supplied with hot blood. But the main cooling mechanism for most animals, which originally emerged in the struggle for existence, is the sweat glands.
From the sweat glands, it is believed that mammary glands later developed - the main thing that distinguishes all animals from non-animals. So this main fundamental property of them follows (historically and logically) from a quality partially lost by some of them - a body dressed in wool.
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