pastel artwork by Elissa

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Coyote Story

I feel sad because all the animals died. They are extinct because other animals ate them. I am not sorry that the dinosaurs are extinct. They were too big. I wonder what extinct animals they rhino and elephant are related to?

Sean Bell replies: Well, those are tricky questions. The closest living relatives of rhinos include horses and tapirs but there are way neater ones that have been extinct for 30 Million Years or more! Some of them looked nothing like rhinos, such as Chalicotheres. Others were sort of rhino-like, called Brontotheres, but they had a Y-shaped bone on their noses. Finally, there were a lot of different rhinos, even here in Canada. Some had horns, like today, but some had no horns at all, but grew huge. The biggest is called Indricotherium, and it was the size of a sauropod dinosaur!
As for elephants, they don't have many relatives. Today, there are strange little animals called hyraxes that are their closest relatives. Past elephants had a wide range of types, including ones with 4 tusks, 2 lower tusks, flat, shovel-shaped tusks and very long, straight tusks.
These names probably don't mean much. I encourage you to look for them on the internet--you should be able to get pictures of them if you type in those names!

I decided to draw zebras because it is endangered. It is endagnered because people are killing the zebra for it's skin.

Dear Elissa, I wonder why people want Zebra skins so badly? What do you think that they do with them? The other day, when I was at a book store, I saw a journal that had a fuzzy zebra skin on it. It was a fake zebra skin but it looked real to me. Why do you think people like the skin? Is it the design, the colours? I wonder if people, in the past, would have killed so many Zebras if they had the technology we have now to make pretend Zebra skins. Ms. R-M