Everything You Know About Animals is Wrong by Brown Matt;

Author:Brown, Matt;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pavilion Books

* FOOTNOTE: Both of which have excellent memories, powers of mimicry and an ability to use tools. The phrase ‘bird brained’, meaning stupid, would be slander to these species.

Turkeys come from Turkey

With its blue face and crimson flesh pendants (known as a snood and a wattle), the turkey is the most distinctive animal on the farmyard. Even so, it has suffered more than one identity crisis.

The large, gobblesome birds are not indigenous to Turkey. Nobody from Turkey, or indeed Europe, had ever met the bird until about 500 years ago. This is an American import. The domestic turkey – the one consumed at Christmas and Thanksgiving – is descended from a single subspecies of wild turkey native to central Mexico.

The bird was domesticated some 2,000 years ago, but Europeans didn’t get a taste until the Spanish came plundering in the 1520s. The bewildered fowl was soon exported across the Atlantic. By the end of the century it was well-known enough for Shakespeare to make a reference in Twelfth Night: ‘Contemplation makes a rare turkey-cock of him. How he jets under his advanced plumes!’

But where did that name come from? The leading theory puts it down to misidentification. The English seem to have mistaken the bird for the guineafowl, which had already been imported from the Americas and traded by Turkish merchants. Other countries baste the bird with their own confusions. The Turkish word for turkey is hindi. This mirrors the French word dinde, and both have the trimmings of an Indian origin. Malaysians call it ‘Dutch chicken’. The Greeks opt for ‘French chicken’. And so it goes on.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.