baluchithere

An indricothere.

[New Latin Baluchithērium, former genus name : BALUCHI(STAN) + Greek thērion, wild beast; see treacle.]

"There is no there there," said the writer Gertrude Stein about Oakland, California, her hometown. She wouldn't have said that about Gering, Nebraska, population 7,946, located twenty miles from the Wyoming border on State Route 71, because there is a 'there there: the world's only authentic replica of a baluchithere.

And what is a baluchithere? Why, it's the world's largest prehistoric land mammal, a kind of maximum rhinoceros measuring nineteen feet tall and thirty feet long. It's on display in the Wyo-Braska Museum of Natural History at 10th and U Streets in Gering, along with a prehistoric triceratops, hyracodon (another prehistoric rhinoceros), and dinohyus (a prehistoric pig eight feet high and twelve feet long), plus over two hundred specimens of present-day animals from around the world. Hand-painted dioramas show the animals in their native habitats.

How did the baluchithere end up in Gering? Wyo-Braska director Ron Kephart explains that it is a copy of an extinct model baluchithere at the University of Nebraska. That one had to be destroyed because it contained asbestos. Aside from the Wyo-Braska Museum, the only place you can find baluchitheres nowadays is in the role-playing game RuneQuest.

The baluchithere flourished twenty-five million years ago on the other side of the world from Nebraska, in the region known as Baluchistan, where the Baluchi language (or Balochi, the official spelling) is spoken today in three variants by about five million people. This includes parts of present-day Pakistan, Iran, and Afghanistan; nearly four million of the Baluchi are in Pakistan. In 1913 an English naturalist named the animal baluchitherium in recognition of the place where its bones were found.

Baluchi is a member of our Indo-European language family, in the Indo-Iranian branch, a close relative of Farsi or Persian. No other words of Baluchi have made their way into English, in Nebraska or anywhere else.