N’dama Skull
Wednesday, 31st January 2007 by Alex Turnbull
In the desert of Mali, West Africa, we find the skull of an ex-cow, which was captured as part of the National Geographic Africa Megaflyover project. By the look of those horns, I'd say the skull probably once belonged to an N'dama, a species of cattle which is indigenous to this part of world.
Useless semi-related Wikipedia facts for the day:
The term 'cattle' isn't a plural, but a mass noun, so you can refer to "some cattle", but not "three cattle". Rarely for the modern English language, there is no singular equivalent to "cattle" other than the various gender and age-specific terms - i.e. "a cow" actually only refers to an adult female who has had more than two calves.
Which explains why "the skull of an ex-cattle" didn't sound right...
Thanks to Felippo and googleearthhacks.
Actually, the plural for cows is Kine. Check it out.
Jeff
A bovine?
I’d always thought kine was singular for cattle. Google “define:kine” gives “seven thin and ill-favored kine” as an example.
I don’t understand how this could be so clear, isn’t that area extremely remote? I can’t even look at my grandma’s house in PA because she lives in a semi-rural area, but I can look at some cow head in the middle of the African desert?
“kine” on dictionary.com is actually defined as the plural of cow. Anyway, it’s archaic and therefore doesn’t count!
Oh My… a Resolution of Few Centimeters??? The scale is 2 Meters!!!!
Like 1984 (Orwell)
I Can See You!! Watch Out!!
Ryan, this image is part of the National Geographic Africa MegaFlyover, which involves loads of images taken by a guy in a plane over Africa – which Google added to maps and earth back in 2005.
Humph. Can somebody tell me why a dead bovine skull warrants a resolution five times bettter than that of the sunbathers?
Are you absolutely sure you would say “ex-cow”? I mean, when someone dies you don’t call them an ex-human… Oh hey! That brings to mind the Dead Parrot Sketch!
Thank you Tim – somebody finally got my reference 😀
OK, so the next thing we look out for is a hovercraft full of eels… 😉
It has ceased to be!
Why is it that when I zoom out and try to zoom back in, it doesn’t zoom in as closely?
Also, when zoomed out, I enjoy looking at the little regularly spaced squares of zoomage scattered throughout the field of blurriness.
Chris,
Google maps doesn’t officially support zooming higher than zoom level 19. If you click “show link” on the map page, and then edit the link it shows in the address bar, you can push the zoom higher in areas with very high resolution shots. For example if you want to zoom in on one of those squares of zoomage:
becomes
(Not that I can find anything worth looking at in any of those other high res areas of course!)