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The following text reflects earlier scientific understanding of the term and of those animals which have constituted it. According to this understanding, invertebrates do not possess a skeleton of bone, either internal or external. They include hugely varied body plans. Many have fluid-filled, hydrostatic skeletons, like jellyfish or worms.
Related to modern German leiche or modern Dutch lijk, both meaning 'corpse') is a type of undead creature. Various works of fantasy fiction, such as Clark Ashton Smith 's " The Empire of the Necromancers " ( 1932 ), had used lich as a general term for any corpse, animated or inanimate, before the term's specific use in fantasy role-playing games.
The etymology of the Scots word kelpie is uncertain, but it may be derived from the Gaelic calpa or cailpeach, meaning "heifer" or "colt".The first recorded use of the term to describe a mythological creature, then spelled kaelpie, appears in the manuscript of an ode by William Collins, composed some time before 1759 [2] and reproduced in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh of ...
In the English language, many animals have different names depending on whether they are male, female, young, domesticated, or in groups. The best-known source of many English words used for collective groupings of animals is The Book of Saint Albans , an essay on hunting published in 1486 and attributed to Juliana Berners . [ 1 ]
Antlers are considered one of the most exaggerated cases of male secondary sexual traits in the animal kingdom, [63] and grow faster than any other mammal bone. [64] Growth occurs at the tip, initially as cartilage that is then mineralized to become bone. Once the antler has achieved its full size, the velvet is lost and the antler's bone dies.
A skeleton is the structural frame that supports the body of most animals.There are several types of skeletons, including the exoskeleton, which is a rigid outer shell that holds up an organism's shape; the endoskeleton, a rigid internal frame to which the organs and soft tissues attach; and the hydroskeleton, a flexible internal structure supported by the hydrostatic pressure of body fluids.
The nostrils are large and retracted, the upper-jaw bone contacts the frontal bone, the sagittal crest is missing, the mastoid fills the supratemporal fenestra (an opening on the top of the skull), there is a drop-like ectotympanic (a bony ring that holds the ear drum), and the bones are pachyosteosclerotic (dense and bulky).
The manticore or mantichore (Latin: mantichorās; reconstructed Old Persian: *martyahvārah; Modern Persian: مردخوار mard-khar) is a legendary creature from ancient Persian mythology, similar to the Egyptian sphinx that proliferated in Western European medieval art as well.