“Who in tarnation are you?” said Jayne. He still had a hand clamped over his forearm, to try to stem the blood flow from the savaging he had received. “You’re no grizzly, that’s for damn sure.”
“Of course I’m not a grizzly,” said the bear. (Firefly: Life Signs)

“The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?” (Hello Everybody! The Dawn of American Radio)

But even more fascinating are some of the extinct mammals that have never quite made it into pop culture stardom. There were once wee mammals that glided over the heads of dinosaurs and others that ate baby dinosaurs for breakfast, armadillos the size of Volkswagens, sloths so tall they could dunk a basketball, and “thunder beasts” with three-foot-long battering-ram horns. There were oddballs called chalicotheres that looked like an unholy horse-gorilla hybrid, which walked on their knuckles and pulled down tree branches with their stretched claws. Before it docked with North America, South America was an island continent for tens of millions of years, and hosted a whole family of wacky hoofed species whose Frankenstein mashup of anatomical features flummoxed Charles Darwin—and whose true relationships to other mammals has only just been revealed by the shocking discovery of ancient DNA. Elephants were once the size of miniature poodles, camels and horses and rhinos once galloped across an American savanna, and whales once had legs and could walk. (The Rise and Reign of the Mammals)