Researchers reveal that Dr. Seuss' Lorax was inspired by the African monkey "CBS Philly

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PHILADELPHIA (CNN) – One of Dr. Seuss' most beloved characters can have a real replica, and no, this is not as horrible as it sounds.

fantastic creatures have shaped a lot of childhood imagination, we as a human being are probably better than there are no real Whos or Grinches or Kwuggerbugs wandering about.

But Lorax, the orange ambbadador of the Seuss environment, agrees well with a type of monkey found in Africa.

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This discovery was explored by a group of anthropologists and researchers. the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.

"The Lorax", an environmental fable about the titular creature and its fight to save the exploited Truffula trees, was published in 1972. Two years ago, Dr. Seuss, whose real name is Theodor Seuss Geisel, made a trip to Kenya.

These two seemingly unrelated facts were collected during a chance meeting between Nathanial J. Dominy, professor of anthropology at Dartmouth, and Donald E. Pease, biographer of Geisel. Dominy, a primate researcher who did some work in Kenya, decided to see if the description and illustrations of Lorax – written by Geisel's hand – matched those of Kenyan primates.

tests ("t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding", which "projects multidimensional information in two dimensions for visualization"), Dominy and his team found an answer: The patas monkey.

VIDEO: Beachgoers Form According to the study, the Lorax and Patas monkey share several traits, from their rugged primate stature to their bushy faces and even their voices.

"" [I] It is likely that Geisel met [patas monkeys] at the Mount Kenya Safari Club, "says the study. "Even the voice of the Lorax (a" sneeze sawdust ") resembles the" whoo-wherr "vocalisation of the patas monkeys, the" whoo "is a noisy and sibilant expiration of air. 19659006] The similarities do not stop there. The researchers also noted that Lorax's beloved Truffula trees not only resemble the whistling whistler acacia, a type of tree found on the African savannah, but this particular tree actually provides food for the monkey of patas

after all, Dr. Seuss wrote and drew a lot of really weird stuff), the appearance of Lorax (the character) combined with the intentional ecological message of "The Lorax" (the book) paint a interesting picture.

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"These results support our hypothesis that Geisel was inspired by a monkey monkey and of its ecology ", reads in the study. "Coincidentally to the fact that the book was written during a Kenya safari, the coincidence seems striking."

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