Free Republic

The Indus Valley civilization was one of the most advanced in the world for over 500 years. More than 1000 settlements sprawled across 250,000 square miles of what is now Pakistan and northwest India from 2600 BCE to 1900 BCE. It had several large, well-planned cities like Mohenjo-daro, common iconography, and a script no one has been able to understand. Linguists studying the Indus script don't know anything about the underlying language and there's no multilingual Rosetta Stone, but scholars have analyzed its structure for clues and compared it to other scripts. Most Indologists think it's “logo-syllabic” script like Sumerian...

Attacks on art have been in the news fairy often in recent months. In July, climate activists glued themselves to a copy of The Last Supper believed to have been painted by Leonardo da Vinci’s students and scrawled “no new oil” beneath the image, and in May, the Mona Lisa made the headlines when a museum visitor smeared cake all over the protective glass that guards the famous painting. That incident was just the latest in a series of attacks on the Leonardo da Vinci masterpiece.

While all animal adjectives don't end in -ine (simian, for instance), most of them do. There are -ine terms for more animals than most people know. Here's a short list of some of the lesser-known entries on the list: bats — pteropine bulls — taurine crows — corvine deer — cervine eagles — aquiline fish — piscine foxes — vulpine frogs — ranine geese — anserine hares — leporine horses — equine kangaroo — macropodine lobster — homarine mice — murine peacocks — pavonine pigs — porcine seals — phocine sheep — ovine ticks — acarine wasps — vespine wolves...