How the Rhinoceros Got His Skin – why rhinos have folds in their skin and bad tempers.

How the Camel Got His Hump – how the idle camel was punished and given a hump.

How the Whale Got His Throat – why the larger whales eat only small prey.

How the Rhinoceros got his Skin, woodcut by Kipling The Kangaroo gets its powerful hind legs, long tail and hopping gait after being chased all day by a dingo, sent by a minor god responding to the Kangaroo's request to be made different from all other animals. The Leopard's spots were painted by an Ethiopian (after the Ethiopian painted himself black). The Camel has a hump given to him by a djinn as punishment for the camel's refusing to work (the hump allows the camel to work longer between times of eating). For example, the Whale has a tiny throat because he swallowed a mariner, who tied a raft inside to block the whale from swallowing other men. Nine of the thirteen Just So Stories tell how particular animals were modified from their original forms to their current forms by the acts of human beings or magical beings. (The name Effie does not appear in the text of the stories, where the narrator now and again says O my Best Beloved to his listening child instead.) So at last they came to be like charms, all three of them – the whale tale, the camel tale, and the rhinoceros tale.' They had to be told just so or Effie would wake up and put back the missing sentence. The Just So Stories began as bedtime stories told by Kipling to his daughter 'Effie' (Josephine, Kipling's firstborn) when the first three were published in a children's magazine, a year before her death, Kipling explained: 'in the evening there were stories meant to put Effie to sleep, and you were not allowed to alter those by one single little word. In it, Mowgli hears the story of how the tiger got his stripes.

A forerunner of these stories is Kipling's 'How Fear Came', in The Second Jungle Book (1895). The stories, first published in 1902, are origin stories, fantastic accounts of how various features of animals came to be. Evolutionary biologists have noted that what Kipling did in fiction in a Lamarckian way, they have done in reality, providing Darwinian explanations for the evolutionary development of animal features. The stories have appeared in a variety of adaptations including a musical and animated films. For the book, Kipling illustrated the stories himself. The stories illustrate how animals acquired their distinctive features, such as how the leopard got his spots.

These had to be told 'just so' (exactly in the words she was used to) or she would complain. Kipling began working on the book by telling the first three chapters as bedtime stories to his daughter Josephine. Considered a classic of children's literature, the book is among Kipling's best known works. Just So Stories for Little Children is a 1902 collection of origin stories by the British author Rudyard Kipling.

Just so stories elephant