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Thanks for the welcome, everyone!Kara- I'm afraid the angwantibo is due to be melted down so I can reuse his materials. I'd like to get better at sculpting before I try casting and painting anything.brontodocus- I don't speak German, but I'm guessing "Bärenmaki" means "bear monkey"? If so, it's a literal translation of the genus name Arctocebus. I have no idea what "angwantibo" means; I assume it comes from some language in the animal's native range.Common names are funny. I recently read a book on trees that was written by an Englishman. Many trees native to my country were featured- and the English have apparently assigned them new common names, being unsatisfied with North American English common names! I remember a few instances (British common name first): Wellingtonia = Giant RedwoodSwamp Cypress = Baldcypress Pencil Cedar = Eastern Red CedarAmerican Plane = SycamoreI wish I could remember more...
You could be right about the secret club thing. I'm from the rural South, and learned the names of all sorts of plants and animals from my grandmother. When I started learning more from school and books, I had to learn new common names as well as Linnaean names. Crawdaddies and snake doctors became crayfish and dragonflies, chicken snakes became rat snakes (clearly a PR move by the herp club), water dogs and scorpions were revealed as salamanders and skinks, thorn trees became honey locusts while locusts became cicadas, and so on. It's not that the new common names I had to learn were more accurate or classier or anything; I think it's just a matter of the folks who write the books being Yankees and preferentially using their northeastern colloquialisms. I bet something similar has occurred in your country.I believe "sycamore" in England refers to a type of maple. There's also a fig called "sycamore" (this is the one mentioned in the New Testament story of Zacchaeus, the diminutive tax collector who climbed a sycamore in order to better see Jesus' sermon and about which I had to learn a song in Sunday school that I cannot seem to forget ...). Ahem. As I was saying, common names are funny.One North American woodpecker, the Northern Flicker, has more than 100 common names across its range!