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WoW Taxonomy II: Ailurus

By voltagegate on November 9, 2007.

I had to do it. With the red panda (Ailurus fulgens) at the top of my favorite animals list, I had to know exactly how many folks share enough interest in the firefox to name their toon after its genus name.

So how many Ailuruses are there out there? Seven on the North American servers and three on the European; appropriately, six of them are druids (cat/bear forms). The highest level (and she's leveled in the past few days, so is active) is a 68 feral druid who must have just recently snagged her Staff of Beasts from the Ring of Blood quest series in Nagrand.

i-162950d0ff8f38c87ebb4c742bec2244-ailurus prof.jpg

If you've kept up with TVG, you'll know that I've written a whole series of posts about the evolution and ecology of the red panda, as well as shared some artwork featuring our furry friend. If you haven't, just click the links and they'll take you to some of the posts. Below is a beautiful photo of the animal, captured by SciBling Brian Switek when he visited the Bronx Zoo.

i-40d46243f66bd217ecc7aec60bd24f1f-bronx zoo 112606 433.jpg

Next time, I'm zooming in on the wonderful list I received in the comments of my announcement post, perhaps starting with Brian... You had it coming Switek.

Tags
animals
Culture
ecology
evolution
Just for Fun

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Oh no! Now everyone will know that I'm a geek! Oh wait...

Almost all of my WoW characters (about 24 spread across 6 servers...stupid real life friends all are on different factions/servers) are named after either fungi or chromalveolates (I'm a grad student in Plant Pathology). Some of the names have been changed slightly, since I don't think the -myces ending generally "works" as a character name, and I'm female and prefer my characters to be also. For example, my current main is Kluyveria, but I also have Tilletia, Achlya, Erysiphe, and Sordaria, to name a few. I just looked at the armory, and two other people have also made Erysiphe's...who knew?