"Not until 1996 was a mascot assigned to Linux. Larry Ewing, a Texas A&M student created Tux from the Gimp. Old timers may remember the fox and platypus mascots."

OMG, I am now the "old timer". OMG.

BTW the fox was a second Linus favourite so it stayed on the bottom of kernel.org for a long long time. I visited the site today and surprisingly found that the fox is no longer there. Web archive shows that it was last seen there at the end of May, 2004.