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Like many mammals, grizzly bears are covered in thick fur. Fur is a thick growth of hair that covers the skin of almost all mammals. It consists of a combination of oily guard hair on top and thick underfur beneath. The guard hair keeps moisture from reaching the skin; the underfur acts as an insulating blanket that keeps the animal warm. [1]
Ossicones are columnar or conical skin-covered bone structures on the heads of giraffes, male okapi, and some of their extinct relatives. Ossicones are distinguished from the superficially similar structures of horns and antlers by their unique development and a permanent covering of skin and fur.
In addition to the glandular skin covered in fur found in most modern mammals, modern and extinct synapsids possess a variety of modified skin coverings, including osteoderms (bony armor embedded in the skin), scutes (protective structures of the dermis often with a horny covering), hair or fur, and scale-like structures (often formed from ...
The word skin originally only referred to dressed and tanned animal hide and the usual word for human skin was hide. Skin is a borrowing from Old Norse skinn "animal hide, fur", ultimately from the Proto-Indo-European root *sek-, meaning "to cut" (probably a reference to the fact that in those times animal hide was commonly cut off to be used as garment).
[3] Both ground hair and guard hair are classified as fur. Because human hair acts as both, it can technically be called "fur". In reality, the keratin fibers that are described variously as hair, wool, or fur, depending on the animal type, are all referring to the same thing. [4] Taxidermy animals at the Kunming Natural History Museum of Zoology
The manufacturing of fur clothing involves obtaining animal pelts where the hair is left on. Depending on the type of fur and its purpose, some of the chemicals involved in fur processing may include table salts, alum salts, acids, soda ash, sawdust, cornstarch, lanolin, degreasers, and, less commonly, bleaches, dyes and toners (for dyed fur).
They are similar to the horns of antelopes and cattle save that they are derived from ossified cartilage, [66] and that the ossicones remain covered in skin and fur rather than horn. Pronghorn cranial appendages are unique. Each "horn" of the pronghorn is composed of a slender, laterally flattened blade of bone that grows from the frontal bones ...
In addition, the animal may be single-coated or may have a number of coats, such as an undercoat and a topcoat (also called an outer coat or, sometimes, overcoat), which is made up of guard hair. The state of the coat is considered an indication of the animal's breeding and health. Animals might have different coat quality for different seasons.