"What in the world?" asked
Bill Kurdian to himself when he saw the creature for the very
first time.
It all began when Bill and and his wife Gayle started throwing
dried corn out for the wildlife in their neck of the woods in
eastern Randolph County, North Carolina. One evening, an
odd-looking creature showed up to partake.
It was about the size of a fox, but
with short brown hair and a long cat-like tail. If anything,
it looked like an animal from the African savannah, not something
you'd fine in the eastern United States.
Since then, Bill has seen the creature off and on, with it
wandering up several nights in a row, then disappearing for
awhile.
"Everybody thought I was crazy," said Kurdian, the vice
president of Matlab in Asheboro.
That didn't last long, however, as he captured the animal on two
frames of film on May 20, using a motion-sensing camera that his
wife gave him for Christmas.
Kurdian immediately called Guy Lichty, a curator of mammals at the
North Carolina Zoo in Asheboro. Based on just the
description, however, Lichty couldn't identify the animal.
Then, after seeing the pictures, he and other curators still
couldn't conclusively identify the animal.
One curator, Lorraine Smith, said it could be a grey fox that has
lost much of its fur, possibly because of parasites. She stopped
short of total certainty, however. "You learn with
animals that you don't provide an absolute," Smith said.
Kurdian is keeping his hopes alive
that someone will be able to identify his mystery animal, as he's
currently trying to catch it alive so the zoo or the N.C. State
vet school can run blood tests. "I'm not going to kill
it," he assures people. "I don't think it's a
vicious animal. It's just interesting."
Hummingbird Fossil Found In Germany
by Jonathan
Drake
S: Yahoo! News
(5-6-04)
Those who have taken the time to set a liquid
feeder outside should be familiar with the incredible acrobatics
of the hummingbird. They are the smallest birds in nature,
weighing less than a tenth of an ounce, with some 300 different
varieties worldwide. Hummingbirds can fly backwards,
forwards and sideways, or can hover in midair like a helicopter.
If there's one that distinguishes hummingbirds from the rest of
their feathered cousins, its their wing-flap speed. They can
beat them at an incredible 80 strokes per second; so fast
that the human can only view their wings as a frenzied blur.
Equally incredible is their heart rate. Beating 1,000 times
a minute, they inhale some 250 times in the same period of time.
Question is, how did the hummingbird develop into such a high-metabolic
bird? Why are there not many other birds similar to
it? What fossils do we have that show its gradual
development into what we know them as today?
There's precious little that shows the evolution of the
hummingbird, and a recent find further complicates the
matter. Said to be some 30-million years old, a hummingbird
fossil discovered in Germany is not only the oldest example of the
family of tiny, hovering birds, but the first found in Europe.
"The
amazing thing about this fossil is that it's essentially a modern
hummingbird," Margaret Rubega of the University of
Connecticut told Science. "My mind is a little
blown."
Well, maybe that's because it is.
The
pair of inch-and-a-half-long skeletons possess shoulders that
would have allowed the wings to rotate, an essential feature that
gives hummingbirds their amazing ability to hover and fly
backwards.
What's interesting is that, until this find, the oldest dated
"modern" hummingbird fossils were from South America and
only about 1 million years old. Putting the numbers
together, that's about 29 million years of stasis ... or
non-evolution ... an awfully long time for an animal to not
change.
Maybe
that's because they never did.
Woman Spots Ogopogo
by
Jonathan Robison
S: The Province (6-4-04)
Ogopogo . . . the famed sea monster of Lake
Okanagan, Canada. Titled "Nessie's Canadian
Cousin," the sightings of this mysterious creature abound
still more and more as the years go by, and a woman's recent
sightings continue to add to that number.
Debbie Gelter says she's certain
she saw the legendary monster earlier this week when she heard a
loud bang on the water, then saw three long, shiny, black humps
about five metres long break the surface.
As is commonly reported in Ogopogo accounts, she notes there were
no boats nearby at the time.
It was the second time in recent weeks that she'd seen
something bizarre in the lake. Gelter says two weeks ago she
saw a dinosaur-shaped head and neck moving through the water.
Sightings of large, unidentified
creatures in the lake date back to the 1800s.
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