Baby Tapirs!

It’s the day before the deadline for filing taxes here in America—an ordeal which only grows more complicated (thanks, Intuit, for lobbying to keep the code as complex as possible).  From sea to sea, Americans are staring in baffled confusion at heaps of forms and receipts and rules.  Well, probably the organized ones are happily enjoying their calm evenings and successful lives, having filed months ago…but that certainly doesn’t include everyone!  Anyway, in an ill-conceived effort to make this deadline more palatable, here are some pictures of adorable baby tapirs!

Tapirs are actually perissodactyls.  Their closest relatives are the horses and rhinoceroses.  Perissodactyls were once the dominant quadruped grazers of the grasslands and forests of the Miocene and the Oligocene, but in more recent geological periods the odd-toed ungulates have been fading away.  We can still catch glimpses of these glory years with pictures of adorable tapirs though.

Ferrebeekeeper has mentioned tapirs before—in connection with the baku, a mysterious and compelling mythological creature said to feast on dreams.  I promise to come back and talk about tapirs properly and at length—they are exceedingly interesting survivors or a great age, however today we are focused only on their adorable properties.  Look at how cute these dappled babies are (the little tapirs lose their protective dots as they grow into adulthood).  Good luck with your own red tapir, er, I mean red tape.  We will return to regularly scheduled posts tomorrow…just as soon as I drop some documents in the virtual post-office box.

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