D'OH!

["D.W.Naish" <dwn194@soton.ac.uk>]

Silver ferns bigger than persons? Sorry...

The NZ-Sperm whale-England-Queen snipe were all part of the same 'ironified'
attempt at a joke. Forgive my warped sense of 'humour'.

T. REX BITE MARKS

Didn't Horner report on a Triceratops ilium with big scour marks in it, like a
Tyrannosaurus had tried to close its jaws around the whole structure? Hyaenas
and vultures (I think..) have very acidic stomachs, and it's my guess that
totally carnivorous theropods did too. Hyaenas are as much active hunters as
they are scavengers, so they're not such a bad analogy for other carnivores
like tyrannosaurids. It's fairly widely acknowledged that terrestrial carnivores
CANNOT be true scavengers, because of energy budgets, foraging time etc. So 
what about the Percrocuteroids? These were like big, bulky hyaenas and were (I
think) first described as scavengers, unable to really capture big prey.
Also, early Homo species were scavengers that made a tenuous living by getting
just enough energy from bone marrow for them to make it to the next carcass (or
so it was according to some documentary series on human evolution I saw a while
ago). But this argument doesn't affect the hunting ability of a tyrannosaur, a
banana-toothed ostrich with enough muscle power to bite a cow in half......

(What about Lyrebirds?)

I'm going to copy that aquatic sloth article now....

"Mmm, chocolate -D'OH! Mmm, chocolate - D'OH! Mmm, chocolate - D'OH! BART!"
"Click click click click .....click click clickkkkkkkkkk - - - BOOOMM" -
Physeter macrocephalus as immitated by amateur cetologist Jake Winson

DARREN NAISH