In this series of posts I scour Wikipedia looking for a bunch of random facts about animals in Ubuntu release names. I sometimes make slightly snarky comments about them that I find mildly amusing. This post starts from Ubuntu 7.04. Take a look at part one here. Part 2 took eight years, so you better enjoy it.

Ubuntu 7.04 – Feisty Fawn

So a fawn is a baby deer. The one in the picture above looks far more startled than feisty. I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen a feisty deer.

Regardless, here are some deer facts:

• There are more than 80 species of deer.
• Tufted Deer have tusks. They look like vampires.
• There is an Australian Deer Association. Despite the name, all of its members are humans, not deer.
• The Finnish Forest Deer can weigh up to 550 pounds (~250 kg).
• The Northern and Southern Pudu are the world’s smallest species of deer. They kind of look like dachshund-bear-horn monsters.
• A Golden Eagle killed a dear a few years back. Jesus Christ, that dear looked terrified in the photo.

Ubuntu 7.10 – Gutsy Gibbon

A gibbon is a type of ape. It’s a lesser ape to be more specific. They swing around in the trees and are really loud.

I snuck some facts into the opening, but here are some more, in bulleted format:

• These guys are really loud.
• Like super loud. Some of them even have throat sac to help them yell louder.
• Please don’t call them monkeys.  They don’t like that.
• FYI, apes don’t have tails, most monkeys do.
• So, has a tail = monkey, doesn’t have a tail = probably an ape.
• Lots of gibbons look like old men.
• All of them live in (very roughly) South East Asia.

Ubuntu 8.04 – Hardy Heron

Herons are a group of carnivorous, long legged, birds that look similar to cranes or storks.

It’s heron time:

• There are 64 species spread around the world, except for a few very cold or dry places.
• They generally don’t swim. They wade through the water instead.
• The largest heron is the goliath heron, which is up to 5 feet tall (~1.5 meters).
• Several years went by between writing the previous fact and this one. I have long since forgotten everything I knew about herons.

Ubuntu 8.10 – Intrepid Ibex

An ibex is a group of species of wild goat known for their giant horns.

Ibex facts:

• Both male and female ibexes have horns, but males have larger horns.
• The live in parts of Europe, Asia, and Africa.
• Adults can weigh between 200 and 270 pounds (90 – 120 kg)
• Alpine ibexes almost went extinct until some dude in the Kingdom of Sardinia decided to ban the hunting of them. I would assume that the ban only applied to other people, not him.
• So the previously mentioned “dude”, did continue to hunt them. Like, a lot. Like, he killed thousands of them.
• The survivors went on to become the slightly inbred, but sizeable, population that exists today.

Ubuntu 9.04 – Jaunty Jackalope

The jackalope is a mythical jackrabbit with horns/antlers. It’s a whole species (like unicorns), not a single creature (like the Loch Ness monster).

• They’re native to the US state of Wyoming, but have spread to other states.
• They’re easiest to locate in bars and gift shops.
• They were created in the 1930s by Douglas Herrick and his brother (who apparently wasn’t important enough to be named in the Wikipedia article).
• They’re typically a taxidermied jackrabbit head with deer antlers attached.
• I don’t have a picture of the typical mounted rabbit head with antlers because each animal only gets 2 pictures and the rideable jackalope pictures are cooler.

Next time, in part 3 (probably in another eight years), we’ll looks some lucid lynxes, the ocelot, and more. I’m not going to lie. The next bunch doesn’t look great. Oh wait, Narwhals will be in part 3. It might be OK then.