226: It’s a Mammoth

I have always loved oddball humour, and when I discovered the panels by Gary Larson I became an addict, buying everything he published. His acerbic observations of scientific concepts amused me greatly, combined with his caveman humour and we come close to my fav Larson comic of all time – the experiments in early microscopy shown in this panel. This is doubly accurate as, unlike dinosaurs, Mammoths are a relatively recent extinction, with frozen specimens found still to have plant material in their gut and butchery marks on their bones – I guess Mammoth burgers were tasty to early hominids.

Looking for elephantine, I came across a Woolly mammoth in “Origami Zoo” by Robert Lang thus completing a “hat-trick” of models by him:

this figurative mammoth is lovely – seemingly correct morphologically, the hunched and raised shoulders and relatively demure hind quarters, lovely curly tusks, placid expression and gently curling trunk

This model was nearly a fail, using copy paper – some very thick layers inside make shaping the body very difficult an the paper fatigue nearly split at the shoulders – gently gently was necessary at the collapse stage.

Very happy with this as a first fold, and will fold it again I think with some nice textured paper – this would probably work in large format also as you could model toes and a more complete facial expression. I used a square cut from A3 copy paper and the final model was small and tight – thinner paper would have helped I guess.

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