title: Why Elephants Have Big Ears: Understanding Patterns of Life on Earth
author:  Chris Lavers 
description: This book might have been titled <i>On the Perfection of Crocodiles</i>.  Chris Lavers, a biogeographer at the University of Nottingham, argues that "After 200 million years of hegemonic ecological success, it is time to recognize crocodilians for what they truly are: perhaps the closest approximation to an unsurpassable ecological design in the entire history of tetrapod life." There's a reason, he shows, that "alligators are as tough as old boots": it's not necessarily better to be warm-blooded. "If the warm-blooded condition were inherently superior in the struggle for life, then the world would be crawling with mammal-like and bird-like creatures, whereas in truth it is quite literally crawling with lizards, frogs, snakes, spiders, and beetles." Lavers looks around the animal world and points out that it's full of large warm-blooded creatures and many, many more small cold-blooded ones.
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  # Discworld 24 - Fifth Elephant
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  # Discworld 24 - Fifth Elephant
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  The Fifth Elephant
  
  
  A Discworld Novell by Terry Pratchett
  
  
  They say the world is flat and supported on the back of four elephants who
  themselves
  
  
  stand on the back of a giant turtle.
  
  
  They say that the elephants, being such huge beasts, have bones of rock and
  iron, and
  
  
  nerves of gold for better conductivity over long distances.
  
  
  They say that the fifth elephant came screaming and trumpeting through the
  atmosphere of
  
  
  the young world all those years ago and landed hard enough to split continents
  and raise
  
  
  mountains.
  
  
  No one actually saw it land, which raised the interesting philosophical
  question: when
  
  
  millions of tons of angry elephant come spinning through the sky, and there is
  no one to
  
  
  hear it, does it - philosophically speaking - make a noise?
  
  
  And if there was no one to see it hit, did it actually hit?
  
  
  *Not rock and iron in their dead form, as they are now, but livin