Hexley

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For the famous biologist, see Thomas Henry Huxley

The Standard Hexley Design

Hexley is the mascot of the open source operating system Darwin, which is the core of Apple Inc's Mac OS X operating system. Hexley is a cartoon platypus who usually wears a cap resembling a demon's horns. He carries a trident, similar to the BSD Daemon, to symbolize the daemon's forking of processes.

Hexley was designed and copyrighted by Jon Hooper. Hexley is not affiliated with Apple Inc.

The name was a mistake — it was originally supposed to be named after Thomas Henry Huxley, a 19th century English biologist who was a well-known champion of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution (nick-named "Darwin's bulldog"); however ignorance led not only to a mistake in Huxley's name, but who he was (the developers apparently thought he was simply Darwin's assistant, when in fact he was a prominent biologist in his own right). By the time the mistake had been discovered, however, it was deemed too late to change and the incorrect name "Hexley" was kept.[1]