Imagine if you had a two-foot-long nose.

Look out into the space in front of you, and imagine a two-foot-long javelin of a nose protruding from your own face.

What would life be like if you were born like this?

Let's be honest, this would be a handicap that would thwart you in almost all of

life's pursuits. It'd be hard to move around, hard to eat, hard to drink, hard to play sports,

hard to exercise, hard to interact with others, hard to see things. It's hard to imagine a task

that wouldn't be inconvenienced by a two-foot-long nose.

Social distancing might get slightly easier, but that's the only upside I can see. And this is true for any

animal. Give any animal a nose, beak, or snout, one-third of their body length, and you will doom them to being

selected out of the gene pool, right? Almost any animal born with that condition surely would not

survive to adulthood. Could an animal with that trait triumph in the battle for survival?

And is it inconceivable that an animal could succeed not in spite of such a trait,

but because of it?

If so, today we are going to talk about the actualization of the inconceivable.

Today we're going to talk about the toucan.

Ramfastos Toko.

I'm Mackin. This is Species.

Music Tocco. I'm Mackin. This is Species. Welcome to the show. I hope everyone is staying healthy,

staying safe. Thank you so much, as always, to all the donors who support this show. I cannot tell you how much your support means to me. And for you guys, I'm going to keep

pumping out content as much as I can. So tomorrow, Monday, around 3 p.m., probably a little after,

I'm planning to do a live conversation with a very special guest. You can watch on my Twitter

page. We'll be touching some hot topics. So if you want to be there for that as it happens, you can follow me on Twitter at Mac and Murphy and turn on notifications just for tomorrow so you get an alert when you're live. Fingers crossed that it all works out, and we'll see you there.

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