The Dodo

This verse has changed in feeling with its context, I am sure. The last dodo was supposedly slain by a fisherman who feared it was a witch - as Seth Godin remarked in a recent post, we fear what we do not understand.
The Dodo used to walk around,
And take the sun and air.
The Sun yet warms his native ground--
The Dodo is not there!
The voice which used to squawk and squeak
Is now for ever dumb--
Yet you may see his bones and beak
All in the Mu-se-um
~Hilaire Belloc, The Bad Child's Book of Beasts

The Big Baboon

As well as the verse below, this contains an echo of the cautionary Sheridan Le Fanu story "Green Tea", which may have been inspired by the passage in "A Christmas Carol" in which Scrooge accuses Marley's ghost of being a blot of mustard. As with the two preceding posts, clicking on the image to get the large view will reveal more details.

The Big Baboon is found upon

The plains of Caribou;

He goes about with nothing on

(A shocking thing to do.)

But if he dressed respectably

And let his whiskers grow,

How like this Big Baboon would be

To Mister So-an-So!

~Hilaire Belloc, The Bad Child's Book of Beasts

It's interesting that Belloc was a devout Catholic who found the the theory of evolution unacceptable - a little return of the repressed here?