Bizarre Beasts Pin: Tenrec

What happens when, instead of many animal shapes converging on a single form, a single animal ancestor speciates into forms that look like a lot of different critters? If all crustaceans “want to be” crabs, then tenrecs “want to be” basically any other small mammal. There are tenrecs that look unsettlingly like hedgehogs, shrews, and moles! But tenrecs also have a lot of pretty bizarre traits for mammals, like having cloacae (a single opening for the urinary, digestive, and reproductive tracts), with one species even communicating by rubbing its quills together to produce sound!

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