A scary-looking animal, and feared at the bottom of the sea, the Japanese Spider Crab can do some serious damage with its claws that act like spears. You can see that this animal may be the prime source of inspiration to H. R. Giger’s alien face grabbers, from the Alien movie franchise.
Horses aren’t the only farm animal that tends to get big. Cows can grow to be unusual sizes, such as Blosom, the 6ft high bovine that weighed 2,000 lbs and produced 72,000lbs of milk per year. Blosom died in July of 2015 on her farm in Ireland, but was still awarded “world’s largest cow” by Guiness later that year.
Weighing around 55lbs, this giant rabbit eats around $75 worth of food a week, including mostly carrots, corn, cucumbers, broccoli. He’s no Bunnicula, though, he loves his veggies and eats the entire thing!
Gary is a 112-pound capybara rodent that lives in Texas and has his own swimming pool to keep cool (which he loves!). His owners play with him in the pool every day and he even performs tricks (or so say the owners).
So, what’s a capybara rodent? Glad you asked. Capybaras are close relatives to guinea pigs and distant relatives to chinchillas. It’s often hunted for meat and its fat is used in pharmaceutics. Now are YOU glad you asked?
Horses can tend to get very big as they are large animals to begin with. But Poe, a horse which Shereen Thompson of Ontario, Canada rescued in 2008, has grown to be about 10ft tall with his head held high and requires a whopping two bales of hay, 10lb of grain and 75 gallons of water PER DAY to survive.
Before Giant George passed away in 2013, he was the world’s tallest dog, and quite easily the biggest dog in the world at 7ft 3 inches, astounding audiences the world over. He was showcased on Oprah Winfrey, The Today Show, Good Morning America, Animal Planet, Regis and Kelley, and many more TV shows. He had a HUGE internet following, with many believers in an afterlife wishing him well in a place people call “Rainbow Bridge”, shedding new light on the influence of domesticated animals on their owners.
Not only is Giant George the biggest dog in the world, but his bark is definitely much bigger than his bite!
Nobody expects a rodent to be four feet high or a house cat to be four feet long, but these giant animals DO exist.. and we have the pics to prove it! We researched the background on these big animals to make sure they were real. Unfortunately, some have died due to their size. See these huge animals, from domesticated to the wild, in this series on Giant Animals.
While you’re biting the heads off your chocolate bunnies this weekend, you might wonder how cartoon rabbits became so central to our Easter celebrations. It’s tempting to assume that because there’s no biblical basis for the Easter Bunny, rabbits and hares have no religious significance – but that’s just not the case.
In fact, the symbol of a circle of three hares joined by their ears has been found in a number of churches in Devon. Like much of our cultural “bunny” symbolism, the meaning of this image remains mysterious – and The Three Hares Project has been set up to research and document occurrences of the ancient symbol, examples of which have been found as far away as China.
Rabbits and hares have also been associated with Mary, mother of Jesus, for centuries. Their association with virgin birth comes from the fact that hares – often conflated mistakenly with rabbits – are able to produce a second litter of offspring while still pregnant with the first.
Virginity or fertility?
Titian’s painting The Madonna of the Rabbit depicts this relationship. Mary holds the rabbit in the foreground, signifying both her virginity and fertility. The rabbit is white to convey her purity and innocence.
Linking rabbits with purity and virginity is odd, however, since they’re also associated with prolific sexual activity, a reputation Hugh Hefner appropriated for his now infamous Playboy logo. Hefner claims that he chose a rabbit as the logo for his empire because the bunny is “a fresh animal, shy, vivacious, jumping – sexy. First it smells you, then it escapes, then it comes back, and you feel like caressing it, playing with it. A girl resembles a bunny. Joyful, joking.”
Hefner’s striking sexism aside, rabbits’ reputation for fecundity has also meant that they’ve been used as a symbol of fertility for centuries and have become associated with spring.
Ye olde Saxon mythe
Indeed, some folklorists have suggested that the Easter Bunny derives from an ancient Anglo-Saxon myth, concerning the fertility goddess Ostara. The Encyclopedia Mythica explains that:
Ostara is the personification of the rising sun. In that capacity she is associated with the spring and is considered a fertility goddess. She is the friend of all children and to amuse them she changed her pet bird into a rabbit. This rabbit brought forth brightly coloured eggs, which the Greek goddess gave to children as gifts. From her name and rites the festival of Easter is derived.
Indeed, in his 1835 book Deutsche Mythologie, Jacob Grimm states that “the Easter Hare is unintelligible to me, but probably the hare was the sacred animal of Ostara … Ostara, Eástre seems therefore to have been the divinity of the radiant dawn, of upspringing light, a spectacle that brings joy and blessing, whose meaning could be easily adapted by the resurrection-day of the Christian’s God.”
The myth of Ostara, then, has become a popular theory for the derivation of the Easter Bunny – although it is a contested one. Either way, it seems that the association between the Easter Bunny and Ostara began with the 8th-century scholar the Venerable Bede in his work The Reckoning of Time. Bede said that our word “Easter” stems from “Eostre” (another version of the name “Ostara”). There is, however, no other historical evidence to support his statement.
Modern bunnies
The earliest reference to an egg-toting Easter Bunny can be found in a late 16th-century German text (1572). “Do not worry if the Easter Bunny escapes you; should we miss his eggs, we will cook the nest,” the text reads. A century later, a German text once again mentions the Easter Bunny, describing it as an “old fable”, and suggesting that the story had been around for a while before the book was written.
In the 18th century, German immigrants took the custom of the Easter Bunny with them to the United States and, by the end of the 19th century, sweet shops in the eastern states were selling rabbit-shaped candies, prototypes of the chocolate bunnies we have today.
So whether bunnies are unclean, symbols of prolific sexual activity, or icons of virginity, the enigmatic Easter Bunny looks likely to remain a central part of Easter celebrations – recently, one was even involved in a surreal mass brawl in a New Jersey shopping centre. Just where they came from, however, will probably have to remain a mystery. At least for now.
This graffiti artist named Nychos dissects animals all over city walls — through his art, of course.
Graffiti art is some of the most interesting art when done well. The artists typically put so much of themselves into one giant piece on a wall and, if the mural isn’t commissioned, run the risk of losing it forever if the building owner decides to paint over it. Case in point, the famous 5 Points Graffiti Mecca in NYC was one of the most culturally diverse landmarks of the city, and when it got painted over, hearts around the world were broken.
Luckily, graffiti artists are resilient, and Nychos is no exception. From their website:
Blending themes of morbid corporeality with the colorful, hyper-loony aesthetic descended from comics and cartoons, Nychos has developed a unique style that performs with powerhouse effect whether on the street or in the gallery.
In Nychos’ world, Spongebob has a skeleton, people live inside rabbits and there is always something wicked underneath. Pumped up on the visual adrenaline of comics, heavy metal and graffiti, Nychos’ work reflects the immense energy and technical focus necessary to produce work on the massive scale he has reached on the streets.