Tony Furnivall writes:

> At 02:15 PM 9/23/98 -0700, Steve Dirickson wrote:
>  >Unfortunately, calling such date styles "Julian dates" is probably pretty
>  >much in the same category as referring to a single-humped "ship of the
>  >desert" as a "camel", or thinking that a sentence like "I will, hopefully,
>  >hear something by tomorrow" is grammatically correct; all of them are
wrong,
>
>  Now that's a new one on me. I thought that the single-humped beastie was in
>  fact a camel, just a different species. Can you enlighten me/us?

This is really more than any slightly sane person would want to know -- but,
nonetheless, I find it interesting (which certainly doesn't bode well for me
:-):

One hump or two, both animals are of the genus, Camelus. The two species are
C. bactrianus and C. dromedarius, and are close enough genetically that non-
sterile hybrids commonly occur when the species are artificially interbred.
The Dromedary, btw, is also called the racing camel -- and that's where it
gets its name (the words dramein in Greek and dromos in Latin mean "to run").

Not only are camels camels, but so are llamas. They are New World isolates of
the family Camelidae (guanacos are vicunas are the two wild species; alpacas
and llamas are the domesticated camelids).

Camels were common across the whole of the Holarctic (the Northern temperate
zone that rings the Earth), including North America, until 30,000 years ago,
when humans migrated from Asian into North America and created a great wave of
mass extinction. Horses, camels, mammoth, cheetah, etc. were all extincted by
the arrival of overly efficient hunters. The pronghorn antelope that populates
North America now exhibits its extraordinary speed to escape a cheetah that is
no longer here -- and is thus a relic of a different time.

But even more interesting perhaps, the Arabic word for camel is "gimmel," from
which the Greeks derived their letter, Gamma, and its name -- the symbol for
which is a pictograph of a camel. In fact, if you look at the letter Gamma,
you can still easily see the camel.

Wirt Atmar