Cammles, with their tall slim legs, long neck that dips downwards and rises up again

to meet their small head, and of course their famous humped back, it's hard to mistake

them for anything else. It may surprise you, however, to learn that there are in fact three

different species. The most common is the Arabian camel, also known as the dromedary.

They make up about 90% of the world's camel population and were domesticated more than 3,000 years ago.

When we talk about domestication, this is the process whereby animals are trained to live or work

alongside humans. This is achieved by selecting individual animals with preferred qualities,

be it stamina, or those that are simply calmer and easier to handle, for example, and using them

to breed the next generation. The second species of camel are the bacterians, which were domesticated

even earlier between 4 and 6,000 years ago. They are native to central Asia. Finally, there are

the wild camels, which go by the scientific name Camelus Ferris. Much like the bacterian camels,

they have two humps on their backs instead of one. This wild species lives in the goby desert,

and as such their range stretches out across Mongolia and northwestern China. Unlike their cousins,

however, they've never been domesticated. Still, what I find particularly fascinating about

these camels is that some will happily survive drinking water with a higher concentration of salt

than that found in seawater. Weird. Not only are they mystifying animals, but with less than a

thousand wild camels thought to be an existence, they are one of the most endangered large mammals on

the planet. If like me, you're likely to forget which camel is the dromedary and which one is the

bacterian. Here's a neat trick to help you remember that the dromedary has one hump and that the

bacterian camel has two. If you think of the letter D lying on its side, it kind of looks like a

single hump, whereas the letter B lying on its side looks like a double hump. So D stands for

dromedary and one hump, with B standing for bacterian which has two. I really like that one.

...