As much as I love animals, you'd have thought that science would have been my favorite subject in school. It wasn't. Science, I learned pretty quickly, is a pretty broad subject, and very little of it was spent on the subject matter that I actually cared about - ecology, evolution, taxonomy. Most of it was rather dull physics and chemistry, and even the biology portion was largely tailored to the kids in class who wanted to be doctors when they grow up... not zookeepers.
The subject that I really enjoyed was social studies, especially geography. You can't go wrong in studying the world... because everywhere you go, there are animals. Most of my knowledge about the shape and character of the world comes from studying animals - learning the names of different regions, the location of countries as they fall on range maps, the mountains and rivers and lakes that define the distribution of a species. Some species are cosmopolitan and straddle the globe. Others are very localized, and many countries have at least one species found there and nowhere else. (As a result, my geography is a little patchier than most folks, being more focused on Asia, Africa, and South America than, say... Europe).
Enjoy this month's quiz, guessing the names of different geographic features by the animals named after them.
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