h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

OK... my first outing as a questionsetter, so be kind to me.

What can you tell me about the world's biggest mouse?

And how did it differ to the majority of the other animals in the menagerie? (these came in two distinct phyla: extra points awarded for naming them)

Bonus points may be awarded as there are quite interesting spin-offs from the central question!

Biggest mouse? Well, the current largest rodent is the capybara.

But there was a prehistoric rodent in South America that weighed over a tonne, about the size of a horse...

Was it actually a kangaroo and differed by being a marsupial?

Damn, Mal beat me to capybara!




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Well, one would be Chordata. Is the other one.... an arthropod?

Oooh... I really hate to have to do this to the first caller as it's quite mean and I was hoping to build up a bit of goodwill here, but (putting on my best Stephen Fry exprerssion of ineffable smugness here) this one's a , I'm afraid... (-5?)

However, the information about the capybara was quite interesting, sao I can compensate with a and bung you a (+3) straight back...

sorry about that, cast the Things Called Mice net a little bit wider...

And just checking, "phylum" is the group an animal belongs to, isn't it, such as "reptile" or "fish" or "insect"?

If not (whoops) I'd have to rephrase that bit of the question.

Kingdom
Phylum
Class
Order
Family
Genus
Species

(Which you can remember with the sentence "King Philipp Chases Old Fat Girl Scouts" )

Now, which exactly was the klaxon?

Phylum means the basic body plan an animal has; reptiles and birds etc all have spinal cords and backbones, so they're all chordates. Insects don't so they're not.

Thanks Mal.

Is there a mouse-squid?

Slightly rephrased, one word difference:-

OK... my first outing as a questionsetter, so be kind to me.

What can you tell me about the world's biggest mouse?

And how did it differ to the majority of the other animals in the menagerie? (these came in two distinct FAMILIES: extra points awarded for naming them)

Bonus points may be awarded as there are quite interesting spin-offs from the central question!

*****************

Can I bung Malabarista an elf-point for helping out? Hope so!

Remember: we're scanning the whole of time and space for applications of the word "mouse" here - not the living creature that very scrupulously avoids cheese if other foodstuffs are available, but an entity named after it. If it lives and breathes, it gets a !

I was considering buying one of these - http://www.emptech.info/product_details.php?ID=1318

They're supposed to reduce the risk of RSI

For those who can't follow the link - it's the whalemouse.

Good pun, good pun... in a way the right train of thought but not yet the correct line

This isn't anything to do with Roman war machines/techniques? they used to form a tortoise (put all their shields up in an interlocky way) which would be from the family Reptilia, whereas the mouse is Mammalia?

RF

Getting warmer! But still not there yet.

Is this mouse greman in origin

Is it the Tiger-Mouse Hitlers 200+ ton battle tank

The German might be Tiger-Mause or something its the biggest thing I can think of named after a mouse

Jerry was a mouse.

Tom was a cat

Spike was a bulldog.

And they're HUGE!

(and they're cartoons so they don't breath either.)

Between them they've won 7 Academy Awards, the first four consecutively starting in 1943, The Cat Concerto (1946) - where Tom plays variants on the Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody medlied with "On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe', itself an Oscar winning song original sung by Judy Garland - and Is one of my all time favourite cartoons, this side of anything with Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote.

Beep! Beep! thbbbp thhbbp

Bob Stafford won it for +3 points on the first half of the question - it's the E-100 "Maus" main battle tank of 1944, weighing in at a mighty 100 tons. Only two such tanks were ever completed - the German Army didn't really want them, and was looking for a tactful way of persuading Adolf Hitler that while his brainchild had a been a nice idea, well done for trying, et c, it wasn't really what they were looking for. Speer estimated the amount of time , man-hours, factory line space, and materials put into the Maus projct could have built another forty or fifty of the standard Panzer IV medium tank ( a lieghtweight at twenty-five tons), a vehicle the Wehrmacht had a great deal more use for.

The drain in terms of fuel consumption was also prohibitive: moving a hundred tons of steel monster around burnt a lot more fuel, it could never have been transported by rail as it was too big, nobody had paid any attention to building a tank transporter capable of moving it by road, and not many bridges in Europe could accept a 100 ton vehicle trundling over them.

The two completed tanks were commited to battle south-east of Berlin (city of manufacture) in April 1945. Reports are scanty, but it appears one mired in soft ground, sinking up to its belly plates in mud and soft earth. The other did what it was expected to do in combat with the Russians - it took out several Soviet tanks with ease - but it was soon over-run by weight of numbers and its crew surrendered it to the Russians.

Both tanks were captured by the Red Army and one is still on display at the Russian Army's Tank Museum, just outside Moscow and open to the public.

(A third E-100 was being built in Western Germany, but was incomplete at the time of its capture by the British)

Right, the rest should be easy now.... the other animals in this particular Zoo?

The Gremans had Tiger and Panther

And the Sherman had a variation called a Crab

Caterpillars