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Commerson’s Dolphin (Cephalorhynchus commersonii)

Posted on Mar 25, 2009 by in Marine Mammals | 3 comments

Cephalorhynchus commersonii
Number 0245

This dolphin is also called the piebald dolphin. You know who else is piebald? The horse in National Velvet. That’s where I first learned the word. It’s a lovely word. It comes from the magpie, which is black and white, and an old definition of bald that meant “streaked with white.” The Pied Piper of Hamelin is so called because of his particolored outfit. Another nice word is skewbald, which means brown and white patches.

Oddly (I think it’s odd, anyway), there are two subspecies of Commerson’s dolphin found in two rather far-apart places, and that’s it. One group is around the Falkland Islands and the southern coasts of Chile and Argentina. The other is in the Kerguelen Islands, which are in the Indian Ocean some 3,000 miles southeast of Africa’s southern tip.

3 Comments

  1. very nice drawing/painting!!

  2. Thanks, Dad! Where do you draw the line? (Har har.) I call them drawings because they’re with pencils (colored), pens, and markers.

  3. Good One!! Personally, I think of a drawing as more of an outline- not completely shaded in. So I would consider these to be paintings with colored pencil and marker as the medium. There is considerable gray area, though(har, har back).

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