AFO - Elephant vs. Rhinoceros

And now that most of the non-AoS Marvel™-related events are behind us at the moment, let us go back to AFO. True, we have gone over most of them through the years, but we have saved the best for last, really. Let us talk about the ‘Elephant vs. Rhinoceros’ episode.

What sets it apart? Firstly, the quality of CGI. It was always very good in the AFO episodes (for its time), but somehow in ‘Elephant vs. Rhinoceros’, the CGI was especially well done. Good!

Secondly, (technical aspects are important, but for us, they are not that important) is the fact that both combatants in this episode were herbivores and unlike some other episodes, (such as the ‘Jaguar vs. anaconda’), this scenario – an elephant fighting a rhino – is rooted in real life.

Now let us be rational – the ‘Elephant vs. Rhinoceros’ episode is atypical, but it is not unique; AFO did feature two other unusual contestants: the walrus in the ‘Polar Bear vs. Walrus’ episode and the hippopotamus in the ‘Hippopotamus vs. Bull Shark’ episode, and both times the oddballs won. Why?

…Because as it had been discussed in the past, carnivores tend to be built along similar lines; a bear, (either brown or polar, it does not matter) is only distantly related to a tiger, but their skeletal structures are similar. The stoat (ermine, long-tailed weasel, etc.), the bear and the sea lion are related, but they live different lifestyles, and yet their skulls are similar, because they evolved towards the same goal: to feed on other animals. There are plenty of differences – the sea lion specializes in slippery fish, the bear is more of an omnivore, etc. – but the similarities are present as well – and this brings us to the elephant and the rhinoceros.

…Actually, no. This brings us to all of the ‘pachyderms’ – the elephant, the rhinoceros and the hippopotamus. When they were first discovered by the Europeans, the latter had never seen anything like that in Europe, and so, when they began to scientifically classify them, (as opposed to, say, kill them in gladiatorial battles), they put them together as ‘the pachyderms’, the ‘thick-skinned animals’. At the modern times, this term is not so much incorrect, as it is outdated – the ‘pachyderms’ aren’t really related to each other at all, they are much more distant from each other than a tiger and a bear are, comparatively speaking – the rhinoceros is a perissodactyl, an odd-toed hoofed mammal, a cousin to the horse, zebra, wild donkey (and the tapir, which looks kind of like a caricature elephant, and is something of a pachyderm by itself), the hippopotamus is an artiodactyl, an even-toed hoofed mammal, but a peculiar one – it is the most reminiscent of the shared ancestor of both even-toed hoofed mammals and the cetaceans, and the elephant is a proboscidean, a paenungulate, whose closest relatives are the sea cows, the dugong and the manatees, (which physically resembles whales and dolphins instead), and the hyrax, a strange little mammal that looks more like a rodent, (and is the size of one). I.e., the rhinoceros, the hippopotamus and the elephant are the results of three different lineages that led to the same goal: a large, even mega-large, herbivore that towers over the competition…literally. The hippopotamus went sideways by becoming ‘the water horse’, a semi-aquatic animal that lives mostly at the river’s edge, getting the best of the both worlds…while its’ only living cousin, the pygmy hippopotamus, is a much smaller animal that is active mostly at night, and while the two species do share the biological family, they aren’t very close relatives either.

The rhinoceros’ situation is similar – the five surviving rhinoceros species belong to four different families, (though the Sumatran rhinoceros might have died out by now, sad), and…

And they behave differently, the African species are much more terrestrial than the Asian ones are, because there are no hippopotamus species in Asia, and its’ niche there is vacant.

…Okay, there is the Malaysian tapir species, but it is not a widespread species, (though neither are the Sumatran and the Javan rhinoceroses), so it doesn’t come into conflict with its’ rhinoceros cousins, so let’s put it aside. Basically, all of the ‘pachyderms’ tend to lean towards an aquatic lifestyle, both the prehistoric elephants and rhinoceroses have hippopotamus-like species in their family tree; the modern African elephants (two species) and rhinoceroses (also two species) are the most terrestrial of them all, and the ones that had evolved in more extreme conditions, food-wise: there is proportionally less food in the African savanna than it is in the Asian jungle.

…Yes, one of the African elephant species lives in the African jungle, and it is smaller than its’ bush cousin is – and that was the elephant featured on AFO. The rhinoceros featured there was also the biggest modern rhinoceros – the white rhinoceros, as opposed to the black rhinoceros, which lives not in the savanna, but in scrubland, and feeds on leaves, rather than grasses. It is slightly smaller than the white rhinoceros is, but is about 45% lighter instead, and that is important, because in the elephant-rhinoceros-hippopotamus world, size, weight and strength are intertwined: the bigger an animal is, the heavier and stronger it is; the fights of the ‘pachyderms’ have no finesse, just massive damage inflicted on the combatants…literally and directly. The elephant, the rhinoceros and hippopotamus represent three different linages occupying the same niche, and so they function along the same lines, with some different details. The hippopotamus is aquatic, while the elephant towers over its competition, proportionally, it is more gracile than the rhinoceros or the hippopotamus are. And?

And the elephant is proportionally stronger than either the rhinoceros or the hippopotamus are. In a world where brute strength is one of the key factors, this makes the elephant the top herbivore in Africa (and Asia), and as such, it dominates its’ nearest rivals, the rhinoceros and the hippopotamus by a wide margin, and thus its’ victory on AFO was justified.

…That is it for this installment, see you all next time!