Why does a porcupine have quills?
Porcupine's Prickly Secret
Why does a porcupine have quills?
Meet the porcupine: a round, waddling creature wearing what looks like a coat of sharpened pencils. It is slow. It is not fierce. It will never win a footrace against a fox. And yet it strolls through the forest like it owns the place. Why so confident? Because of those quills.
Here's the secret nobody tells you: a quill is just a hair. A wildly upgraded hair. Every porcupine has soft fur underneath, and scattered all through it are these stiffened, hardened hairs that grew thick and sharp instead of soft and floppy. Same starting material as the fuzz on a kitten — just engineered for a very different job.
