Mark Twain by Chuck Jones, courtesy of Chuck Jones Center for Creativity

As long as we are paying homage to the 60th anniversary of Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner, we must pause for a moment and say a thank you to Mark Twain, for it was in his Roughing It memoir that Chuck Jones first read about the coyote, "If I remember rightly, this latter was the regular cayote [sic] (pronounced ky-o-te) of the farther deserts.  And if it was, he was not a pretty creature or respectable either, for I got well acquainted with his race afterward, and can speak with confidence.  The cayote is a long, slim, sick and sorry-looking skeleton, with a gray wolf-skin stretched over it, a tolerably bushy tail that forever sags down with a despairing expression of forsakenness and misery, a furtive and evil eye, and a long, sharp face, with slightly lifted lip and exposed teeth.  He has a general slinking expression all over.  The cayote is a living, breathing allegory of Want.  He is always hungry.  He is always poor, out of luck and friendless."  –from Chapter V of Roughing It by Mark Twain