Yahoo News
Fancy a vomiting hippo ring tone?

LONDON (Reuters) - The sweet birdsong of the nightjar, the roar of a lion or the grunt of a hippo could soon replace the trilling and beeping of mobile phones.

The British Library is offering mobile telephone operators some of its 100,000 recordings of the world's birds and beasts as alternative ring tones.

"Some of the new sounds are lovely, although the hippo does sound rather like someone vomiting," a spokesman at the British Library said on Monday.

The new tones will be only be available on the latest third generation phones following a commercial tie-up between the British Library Sound Archive and iTouch and Mobiletones.

Makes me wish I had a cellphone that could have those types of ringtones. Sadly, my cellphone is still one for the Jurrasic era.