Crossword clues for echidna
echidna
- Australian beast chained up
- Burrowing animal can hide all over the place
- Insectivore concealed in cane abroad
- Insectivore finally found in East Asian country
- Insectivorous mammal
- Initially excited conservationist has isolated genetic code for odd beast
- Australian mammal chained, unfortunately
- Hedgehog look-alike
- Had nice (anag) — spiny anteater
- Egg layer with spines
- Australian anteater
- Anteater with spines
- Spiny anteater
- Animal that's fond of 84-Across
- Burrowing spine-covered monotreme of Australia having a long snout and claws for hunting ants and termites
- Egg-laying mammal
- Greek character embraced by female creature
- English companion with writer recalled Oz native
- Animal character from Greece captured by Dame
- Spiny mammal
- Spiny egg-laying Australian mammal
- Spiny Australian mammal
- Animal that's fond of 84-
- Animal chained cruelly
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Echidna \E*chid"na\ ([-e]*k[i^]d"n[.a]), n. [L., a viper, adder, Gr. 'e`chidna.]
(Gr. Myth.) A monster, half maid and half serpent.
(Zo["o]l.) A genus of Monotremata found in Australia, Tasmania, and New Guinea. They are toothless and covered with spines; -- called also porcupine ant-eater, and Australian ant-eater.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
Australian egg-laying hedgehog-like mammal, 1810, said to have been named by Cuvier, usually explained as from Greek ekhidna "snake, viper" (also used metaphorically of a treacherous wife or friend), from ekhis "snake," from PIE *angwhi- "snake, eel" (cognates: Norwegian igle, Old High German egala, German Egel "leech," Latin anguis "serpent, snake"). But this sense is difficult to reconcile with this animal (unless it is a reference to the ant-eating tongue). The name perhaps belongs to Latin echinus, Greek ekhinos "sea-urchin," originally "hedgehog" (in Greek also "sharp points"), which Watkins explains as "snake-eater," from ekhis "snake." The 1810 Encyclopaedia Britannica gives as the animal's alternative name "porcupine ant-eater." Or, more likely, the name refers to Echidna as the name of a serpent-nymph in Greek mythology, "a beautiful woman in the upper part of her body; but instead of legs and feet, she had from the waist downward, the form of a serpent," in which case the animal was so named for its mixed characteristics (early naturalists doubted whether it was mammal or amphibian).
Wiktionary
n. Any of the species of small spined monotremes in family Tachyglossidae, the four extant species of which are found in Australia and southern New Guinea.
WordNet
n. New Guinea echidnas [syn: spiny anteater, anteater]
burrowing spine-covered monotreme of Australia having a long snout and claws for hunting ants and termites [syn: spiny anteater, anteater]
[also: echidnae (pl)]
Wikipedia
Echidna is the common name for a family of Australian mammals.
Echidnas , sometimes known as spiny anteaters, belong to the family Tachyglossidae in the monotreme order of egg-laying mammals. The four extant species, together with the platypus, are the only surviving members of the order Monotremata and are the only living mammals that lay eggs. The diet of some species consists of ants and termites, but they are not closely related to the true anteaters of the Americas. Echidnas live in Australia and New Guinea.
Echidnas evidently evolved between 20 and 50 million years ago, descending from a platypus-like monotreme. This ancestor was aquatic, but echidnas adapted to life on land.
In Greek mythology, Echidna (; , "She-Viper") was a monster, half-woman and half-snake, who lived alone in a cave. She was the mate of the fearsome monster Typhon, and known primarily for being the mother of monsters, including many of the most famous monsters of Greek myth.
Echidna is a genus of moray eels in the family Muraenidae.
Usage examples of "echidna".
As Sisipyla followed, watching her own feet in their sandals going one before the other, she thought about the terrible lion, and its even more terrible mother Echidna, daughter of Ge and Tartarus, half nymph, half speckled snake, who had lived in a cave in Arcadia, from which she rushed hissing out to seize and devour passers-by.
And in time she was not a snake but an echidna, a snake that hates humans because she wishes she were human.
The whole echidna slid over with a rolling crackle and a cloud of broken rock.
The echidna struck the water loop by loop, sending a long column of spray to dance above the crumbled cliff.
For the body of the Echidna, on the other hand, it is the so-called lattice-work pattern which represents the scale covering,--a pattern employed in vases for the most varied purposes, and found on the earliest Cypriote pottery.
He cannot bear to see the defenseless echidna suffer such an agonizing fate but feels altogether powerless to do anything about it.
I can hardly believe it, but I would never have believed they would set an echidna on fire either.
Hydra The beast of Hera, daughter of the serpent-goddess Echidna, guarded the entrance to the underworld at Lerna.
Then there were an Irish pheasant, an echidna, a turtle, an eagle, eight frogs playing different musical instruments and numerous crocodiles of varying shapes and sizes.
Tiny, bright-eyed birds squabbled among low shrubs, and a spiny echidna dug among the fibrous roots of an ancient mountain ash.
Farther on an echidna broke off its quest after ants, panicked at her approach.
Simna to suspect it was some kind of arthropod siphoner, like an anteater or echidna.
Inning after inning he had Qwilleran stumped with ebionitism and echidna, cytodiagnosis and czestochowa, onychophore and opalinid.
We've just finished sequencing and comparing the allogenomes of echidnas and, of course, platypuses.
He quickly became a leading expert on all kinds of animals living and extinct—from platypuses, echidnas, and other newly discovered marsupials to the hapless dodo and the extinct giant birds called moas that had roamed New Zealand until eaten out of existence by the Maoris.