A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1068 entries
tapir
A tapir is a heavy-bodied hoofed mammal with a short flexible trunk formed from the nose and upper lip, which it uses to grip leaves and fruit. Four species live in Central and South America and one in Southeast Asia, which is a distribution that only makes sense as the remnant of a much wider one. They swim well, walk on river bottoms, and are related to horses and rhinoceroses rather than to pigs.
Etymology
The name came into English through Portuguese from Tupi, a language of coastal Brazil. The Malayan species carries the same word applied by Europeans to an animal on the other side of the world, which is a fair illustration of how the naming worked: one word from Brazil now covers a family split between two continents.
Notes
Tapirs are among the most important seed dispersers in tropical forest, swallowing large fruit whole and depositing seeds miles away, which is why they are sometimes called gardeners of the forest. The Malayan tapir is boldly patterned in black and white, which reads as conspicuous in daylight and as a broken shape in moonlit forest. Young of every species are striped.