RE: Penguins And Rexes

[Allan Edels <edels@msn.com>]

Elephants and horses can lie on their sides.  

Horses do it when they are sick, or having a particularly bad birthing.
And, if you watch old "Cowboys & Indians" movies and shows, you often
see horses sliding or being knocked over during a chase.  The horse sort
of rears its head back, and flings itself upwards towards a standing (or
at minimum kneeling) position after the fall.  Sometimes, the horse
cannot get up, or even if it does, it must be killed because of the
damage done to its legs.  In addition, we tend to see more broken legs
in the thoroughbred horses, because they have been bred for speed, and
they have very thin, long legs.  As an aside, there are 2 sequences to
note about horses in movies - There is a very old clip (black & white -
I think this was from the 1920's) where a horse and rider go over a
cliff into a river that is some 60 feet below.  The horse's rear hits
the water first.  This was done by a famous stuntman (Yakima Canutt) and
a real live horse, who survived the jump.  (They both did!). The other
sequence is in Blazing Saddles, where Mongo (Alex Karras) punches out a
horse, and it falls down.  It survived fine.  

And one final note about horses from real life trivia: Atlantic City, NJ
(USA) had a high-diving Horse on the Steel Pier:  In 1924, Sonora
Webster Carver made history when she plummeted 40 feet on horseback into
a tank of water. The stunt was first performed by W.F. "Doc" Carver, who
became her father-in-law. In 1931, she went blind from detached retinas
suffered after one of her horses, Red Lips, hit the water
off-balance.  Carver continued to ride the high-diving horses until
World War II.  (She died in 2003 at age 99).  The high-diving horses act
continued (after the end of WWII) until the 1970's.

Concerning elephants - most people don't know that elephants can run
(even though their top speed gait isn't considered 'running') up to 25+
MPH (40+ kph).  There are situations where they can fall down. Also,
there have been times when elephants have been darted for various
medical procedures, and humans generally do not need to help them get
up.

Hope this helps the discussion.

Allan Edels

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Eliminate annoying spam!

My mailbox is protected by iHateSpam, the #1-rated spam buster.
http://www.ihatespam.net


-----Original Message-----
From: owner-dinosaur@usc.edu [mailto:owner-dinosaur@usc.edu] On Behalf
Of Dann Pigdon
Sent: Sunday, August 14, 2005 1:38 AM
To: DML
Subject: Re: Penguins And Rexes

David Marjanovic wrote:
> 
> > A good question to ask is do elephants trip?
> 
> I don't think so...

I recently saw a photograph of a two-week old elephant in a zoo
enclosure that had been hurled into a concrete wall by the tusk-flip of
a large bull. Like many youngsters it bounced rather than broke, and
once on its feet again the bull sent it flying a second time with a
well-aimed kick. Adult females eventually stepped in to separate the
bull from the calf, although from what I hear the infant came out of the
experience with little more than a few bruises (both of the physical and
ego variety).

So adult elephants DO trip - that is, they trip juveniles!

-- 
___________________________________________________________________

Dann Pigdon
GIS / Archaeologist         http://heretichides.soffiles.com
Melbourne, Australia        http://www.geocities.com/dannsdinosaurs
___________________________________________________________________