Animals from the Western Caribbean

Hello to all of you who like to color.  The reason we have not posted for over a week is we went on a cruise.  I have surgery on Tuesday...kind of a rotten thing to do on Valentines Day...but anyway, we decided to go have some fun first.  So we went on a Caribbean Cruise.  We went to the Western Caribbean and had a wonderful time.  We saw pyramids and huge figurines...and ANIMALS.  So, while on the cruise I drew coloring pages for all the animals we saw.  We will be posting them in the next two days...before my surgery on Tuesday.  If you are the believing type, please pray for me.  It should be a fairly routine surgery on my throat, in fact it is a re-do of a T-tube placement.  Still, any surgery has a risk.

I think that we went on the cruise when we did to forget about the surgery and the pain that I am in.  My wife is also having some fibromyalgia pain.   So please pray for us that we can get some pain relief and keep drawing and posting pictures for you to color.

We gave blog website cards out to people we met in Honduras, Belize, Mexico and of course on the ship.  They, the crew from the Royal Caribbean's Rhapsody of the Seas and the excursion leaders were very kind to us. . . we can't walk very fast nor climb steep stairs or steep inclines.

To wet your appetite I will post three of the photos of animals we saw on our excursions...along with the picture I drew of them.    Here is the complete list of the animals I drew during our cruise:

 Real Modern Animals, most of which we saw:  Flying Fish that were swimming away from the bow of the ship,  Howler Monkeys,  Spider Monkeys,  Land Iguana,   Great-tailed Grackle (a bird with a long tail),  Dolphins,  and  a capybara-like rodent called an Agouti.

Extinct Animals: (We did not see these in Central America) Tyrannosaurus rex and a Parasaurolophus
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Fantasy Animals:  (Also not seen in Central America)  I drew a few Unicorns.

All these pictures are coming to the coloring pages blog in the next few days.  After I post the ones I am posting today, I will not be able to draw or post for a few days due to recovery time for my trachea surgery.
Keep us in your prayers.

The first three animals I want to post I drew from photos I took myself in Playa Del Carmen, Mexico. All three animals were right next to the sidewalk about 200 yards (or meters) from the ship, right in town.

This is the Great-tailed Grackle 

Great-tailed Grackle

The Great-tailed Grackle is a bird that lives in the southern part of the western and central United States as well as Mexico, Central America, and parts of South America.  They are iridescent 

 black with hints of blues and purples and they have an enormous tail.  They are related to two other Grackle species.  Sorry the photo is a bit blurry.  We were walking fast to make the ferry to the ship. . . so we did not end up stranded in Playa Del Carmen... so I took a fast photo on the run.  Like many people, I thought it was just a raven or crown.  I was very wrong.  

Land Iguana from Mexico

Land Iguana from Mexico

THIS animal made me stop in my boots....so I took a better picture.  This particular iguana is so beautiful. I have seen other land iguanas in Ecuador and Marine Iguanas on the Galapagos Islands, but I had never seen one that had this gorgeous  blue or light bluegreen markings/stripes and a powder blue underside.  They can live up to 60 years and they are omnivourus, eating lots of plants and sometimes centipedes, insects, and carrion (already dead animals).  This adult was about 3 feet long (1 meter).  

Guatusa or Central America Agouti

Guatusa or Central America Agouti

This animal is the Central American Agouti.  This animal was near the other two. . . in a small hollow in the city of Play Del Carmen.   Agoutis are related to the South American Capybara.  Our guide to Chichen Itza told us the name the native Mexican Mayans use for this mammal.., but I forgot it.  Our cabin steward on our cruise told us that it is called Guatusa by the natives in the Yucatan Peninsula.  The "Guatusa" is smaller than the South American Capybara.  An Agouti is about 24 inches long (62 cm).  They mate for life and eat mostly seeds.  They are important to the ecology of a region because they disperse the seeds with fertilizer. (they poop out some of the undigested seeds so they get planted with fertilizer in various places far from the parent plant.) 

Charles Darwin found skeletons of this animal family in South America.  It was named Toxidont or poison tooth by Sir Richard Owen (the great English anatomist who created the term "Dinosaur.")

The extinct species of giant rodent (Toxidont)  that Charles Darwin found in South America was a "ROUS" .   This is "Rodents Of Unusual Size", from the great movie Princess Bride.  So now you know that at some point in the not so distant past, there WERE Rodents Of Unusual Size.  IF these were the rats in ancient South America, can you imagine the size of the cats?*  In fact, 3 million years ago there was a giant rodent in the Americas the size of a buffalo (American bison).  

NOTE:  All drawings and photos are Copyright Robin Lyman 2017
Of course permission is granted to print drawings for coloring. 

*Quote from a docudrama movie that I used to show my science students,  It is called Darwin's Dangerous Idea.