Stone louse
ficitious, rodent-like, rock-eating louse
The stone louse (Petrophaga lorioti, in German Steinlaus) is a fictitious animal created by German humorist Loriot in 1976 to parody nature documentaries. It was primarily featured in a video sketch, as well as being a fictitious entry in the German medical encyclopedic dictionary Pschyrembel Klinisches Wörterbuch.
Characteristics
Loriot created a popular mockumentary titled The Stone-Louse, a parody of Ein Platz für Tiere ("A Place for Animals"), a longstanding TV series about endangered wildlife by the famous German zoologist and documentary filmmaker Dr. Bernhard Grzimek (ARD, 20.47-51). The mockumentary chronicles Loriot's 1976 "discovery" of the stone-louse.
The "science documentary" describes the stone-louse as a rodent-like mite in the order "Fictional Rodents", 20 to 24 mm (3⁄4 to 1 in) long which consumes about 28 kilograms (62 lb) of stone per day, depending on the density and tastiness of said stone. Loriot gives some deadpan comments on a filmed building implosion, mentioning the "shy rodent" to be at lunch in its natural habitat (before the implosion). As the building vanishes into dust and rubble in the background, Loriot caringly speaks about the "possierliche kleine Nager" ("endearing little rodents") and concludes with some "alarming" points about the endangered status of the entire species.
Publication in Pschyrembel
In 1983, the clinical dictionary Pschyrembel, from German scientific publisher Walter de Gruyter, contained information about the stone louse for the first time in printed form. The short article is thought to be based mainly on Loriot's TV documentary.
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This entry incorporates text from “Stone louse” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.