Did You Know?

Elephants, rhinoceroses, hippopotamuses - it was a French zoologist named Georges Cuvier who in the late 1700s first called these and other thick-skinned, hoofed mammals Pachydermata. The word, from Greek roots, means "thick-skinned" in New Latin (the Latin used in scientific description and classification). In the 19th century, we began calling such animals pachyderms, and we also began using the adjective pachydermatous to refer, both literally and figuratively, to the characteristics and qualities of pachyderms - especially their thick skin. American poet James Russell Lowell first employed pachydermatous with the figurative "thick-skinned" sense in the mid-1800s: "A man cannot have a sensuous nature and be pachydermatous at the same time."