The Monstrefact: Marvel’s Squirrel Girl

fierce they are. They're such survivors, and the same could be said for Marvel's squirrel Girl. At first glance, you might think this particular superhero is just here for acute pose and a few laughs, and yeah, she's totally down for all of that. But since her creation in the early nineties by Will Murray and Steve Ditko, Squirrel Girl has scored victories against such iconic villains as Ultron, Galactus,

Doctor Doom, and Thanos. Okay, so what are her powers, you might be wondering if you're not familiar with the character already. Well, first of all, it's important to note that squirrel Girl is not technically a mutant, but rather a typical Canadian girl who just gradually began to exhibit an amazing ability to communicate with squirrels and developed the various squirrel like physical abilities as pointed out by Mark Sumrec and Daniel Wallace in the excellent book marvel Anatomy.

She boasts large incisors and rugged climbing claws, both attributes of the real world furry grappling hooks that we call squirrels. She also boasts a full fluffy squirrel tale, which I assume offers a number of benefits enjoyed by her namesake, balance, shade communication, and locomotion assistance while leaping, falling, landing, or swimming. Sumeric and Wallace put her vertical jumping ability at thirty feet or more than nine meters, which feels like a

decent scaling up of squirrel leaping ability. How high could we leap if we had the leaping ability of a squirrel? I think that's about accurate. The one head scratcher, however, is that squirrel Girl also boasts extendable bone knuckle spikes. They extend wolverine style through the back of her palms. Jutting out just above her knuckles, enabling her to punch

and carve through wood as well as through ultron drones. Obviously, rule of cool applies here, and the bone knuckle spikes are indeed cool, no doubt about it, but they do seem kind of unnecessary if we're comparing her to squirrels. Actual squirrels don't have them because they can handle all their woodworking and robot thrashing with teeth and claws alone. For natural world analogs to squirrel Girl's knuckle spikes or Wolverine's famous claus for that matter, we have to leave

the mammal world behind and head into the amphibian world. First, we can look to the hairy frog or Tricobetracus robustus, which can break its own toe bones and extend them through the flesh as makeshift defensive claws, which may later retract, allowing the flesh to heal back over again. Male autumn frogs or Babina subaspera, also boast a different form of

retractable spike that extends from under the thumb. Both of these species are commonly compared to the fictional wolverine, though his namesake animal also makes do with just teeth and finger claws alone, no extendable or retractable claws required. Now, I know there are frog based superheroes and supervillains in the Marvel world, but do any of them have extendable

horror clause? I don't think that they do, at least not yet, so I do put the question out there for any of you comic book fans and especially in of you hardcore Marvel geeks. If you have an answer to this question right in, I would love to hear from you. Tune in for additional episodes of The Monster Fact the Artifact for Animalius Dupendium each week. As always, you can email us at contact at Stuffdblow your Mind dot com.