Why "Zootopia" is Indeed Unique

Say what happened to the tunicates? Well the tunicate article is taking a bit longer than need be. So while we wait for that, here is a little intermission.

Something different for once. Aside from liking all things zoology I also happen to love animation. I grew up watching Chuck Jone's and Tex Avery's cartoons. Disney and Studio Ghibli of course was the thing for me, and Russian animation had a huge influence on me. Animation and zoology are my perfect combo. These two have come hand-in-hand for me as it helped me pay attention to details that help me distinguish certain animals, like a Cooper's Hawk from a Sharp-shinned Hawk.

Now as an artist and zoology student, I will say that I am not big fan of anthropomorphizing animals (even I had done some in the past) - biologically speaking it just would never work - something about a bird using its primaries as fingers to grasp objects, horses with fingers and toes and let us not forget of course the infamous human mammary breasts on various species. Now I know a lot of people enjoy anthropomorphic animals (or "furries" as they are sometimes called), but that is not my cup of tea.

When I heard the announcement of Disney's 55th animated feature Zootopia, there was one thing I could not understand. Disney advertise it as "unique" or "never seen before" in the sense that it is their first feature length to have anthropomorphic animals  Um, no, that is not true. If anything, Disney is known to make anthropomorphic animals which leads us to Robin Hood. Did Disney forget what they do?

I was still confused about this and imagine it is like any other furry creature feature. Until they released the first teaser trailer.

Oh my God. I finally see what they mean - it is unique indeed. One of things that I have noticed is that all of the anthropomorphic animals are mammals. Yep, there are no birds, no reptiles... just mammals. The premise seems like an alternative world where we did not evolved, and instead mammals took their place (it would be interesting to see if there are indeed other great apes in this world). Even more so, these mammals are all of terrestrial species (there could be some aquatic ones, though we shall wait and see). So it is like "Planet of the Terrestrial Mammals".

But what is even more exciting is that they actually applied science to this. Yes, science. They all have certain attributes that relates to their biology - the fox can see in the dark, the sloth is slow, gnu are major herding animals, rabbits hear very well. The anatomy - while human in nature - still goes along with mammalian biology. The rabbit is a female character, but she has no human-like mammaries (yes! No more creepy non-human animals with breasts!); the ungulate characters have human-like feet with big toe(hoof?)nails (the back limbs of ungulates are not double-kneed, but rather short legs with very long ankles and walk on their toes. The filmmakers are correct giving them big feet instead of walking on their toes, so yes!); the number of digits is accurate (the gnu has four, the fox and rabbit have five and the sloth has normal sloth-hands with three claws); lastly their body sizes matches their real-life counterparts.

This may not be a big deal but at least it something unique. If we look at Robin Hood as well as other anthropomorphic animal films, all of the animals were scaled to human-sized (for the most part), but have anatomical inaccuracies that I have mentioned earlier. Now yes there might be some arrows or quirks I will have (like the film saying "animals = mammals" which is not), but I am really excited to see this :D

The Evolution of Ophidiophobia

Eve, the Serpent and Death. Painting by Hans Baldung.

2015 has been an incredible year for snake evolution research with the discovery of the oldest known fossil of the stem-snake line Portugalophis lignites (Caldwell et. al, 2015) and a remarkable paper that details the of the origins of snakes from Yale has found that the ancestor of snakes was a nocturnal snake-like lizard that still retain their hindlegs (Hsiang, et. al, 2015). This stem-snake first appeared around 128 million years ago around the same time that stem-therian mammals were starting to appear as well (Hsiang, et. al, 2015).

Remarkable news indeed, but today I won’t be talking about the evolution or the systematic history of snakes. In fact, I am going to be talking a bit about a different kind of evolution, one that focuses on perhaps the most common and reported phobia that humans have - Ophidiophobia, which a third of the total population of humans have (Isbell, 2009). The causes varies among individuals but it is interesting how some individuals have this phobia, even though they might have not see one in the flesh (Isbell, 2009).

Indeed our instinctive fear of snakes can probably be traced to our primate ancestors beginning around 65 million years ago (Isbell, 2009). Indeed primates are a major food source for some of the larger species of serpents. This natural fear of snakes in our human nature accounts for the various cultural depictions of these animals - the most infamous is the serpent tricks Eve to eat the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden story and untold stories of giant underwater serpents across the globe. The anthropologist David E. Jones had argued that same evolutionary fear of snakes might explain the independent creations of dragons across the globe (Jones, 2002). This orgy of primal fear and human creativity have produced some of the most astonishing works of fantasy.

Now with these two papers out, perhaps our primal fear of snakes goes further in time. Ophidiophobia might have been an ancestral fear in therian mammals. Like these ancestral snakes, the earliest therian mammals were also nocturnal animals. They would have been a nice meal for these stem-snakes, which the root of ophidiophobia appeared as a survival mechanism for mammals. But as mammals begin to diversify and evolved into the various groups we see today ophidiophobia was certainly lost in different groups. We primates were not one of those mammals that have lost our fear and this is how ophidiophobia came to the world.

References

• Hsiang, Y. Allison et. al (2015). The origin of snakes: revealing the ecology, behavior, and evolutionary history of early snakes using genomics, phenomics, and the fossil record. BMC Evolutionary Biology, 15
• Caldwell, M. W., Nydam, R. L., Palci, A., & Apesteguía, S. (2015). The oldest known snakes from the Middle Jurassic-Lower Cretaceous provide insights on snake evolution. Nature communications, 6.
• Isbell, L. A. (2009). The Fruit, The Tree, and the Serpent. Harvard University Press.
• Jones, D. E. (2002). An Instinct for Dragons. Psychology Press.