It's cute, it's furry, and it's massive.  Well, we don't know if it was cute.

It's a guinea pig.  Not an exact guinea pig, but a three-meter-long, 1.3-meter-tall cousin of today's popular pet.  About the size of a buffalo, or cow, it weighed some 700 kilos, and once roamed the lush banks of the ancient Orinoco delta in northwestern Venezuela.

"Imagine a weird guinea pig, but huge, with a long tail for balancing on its hind legs and continuously growing teeth," said Marcelo Sánchez-Villagra of the University of Tübingen, Germany, who led the new study.

"This is a really stunning animal," commented Neill Alexander, a zoologist at the University of Leeds, UK. "However the question is not how is this animal possible, but why aren't there others like it?"

The animal actually had previously been identified from isolated teeth and bone fragments, but no one really had an idea of how big it was.  So when Orangel Aguilera, one of the team, discovered the skeleton after one of his students stumbled across a bone sticking out of some sediment, they were able to analyze and estimate its body mass.

"If you saw this animal in the distance on a misty day it would look much more like a cow or buffalo, than like a guinea pig," says Aguilera.

But what did it eat?  It is believed to have lived a semi-aquatic life, munching sea grass and other vegetation.  With its gigantic size, it would have required a vast amount of food, so wouldn't have fit well in today's world.  When it did live, the world was probably much different.

The question is, when did it live?  Ask a creationist or an evolutionist, and you will get two completely different answers.  For now, I suppose, we can just appreciate the find for what it is.

Story Of The Six-Legged Cow
by Jonathan Drake
S: Sky News (10-9-03)

"She looks so calm and peaceful that after a while you forget she has six legs.  Then you raise your head and see these two extra hooves on the end of these spindly legs coming out of her neck."

Yep, if you're a subscriber to the Authority Explorer, you've read similar headlines like this before.  Another genetic mutation, and like the majority of mutations, this one wasn't beneficial either.

Monks in Cambodia have been stunned by an unusual present . . . a cow with two extra legs.  It was donated by a farmer who feared her extra set of appendages would bring him bad luck.

Named Cham Leck, meaning "Strange" in the Khmer language, it is about 2 months old and is being cared for by monks at the pagoda near the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh.

Course, the folks in that area are highly superstitious, and have been treating the calf with some caution.

In any case, we can see yet again that this mutation didn't produce anything unique beyond the genetic code of the cow.  It didn't sprout a wing, or a fin, but simply two extra legs that are, sadly, completely useless to the poor cow.

Limb Of The Yeti Discovered?
by Vincent Rains
S: BBC News (10-03)

It was found some 3,500 meters up in the permafrost of the Altay mountains, in Russia's remote Siberia region, and is causing quite a stir among some scientists.  Why?  Simply because it raises the possibility that the local legend of the yeti - the abominable snowman - is more than just fiction.

It's a well-preserved furry limb, and X-rays show that the bones are several thousand years old.

"I turned the limb over and examined the sole of the foot, and I thought it looked unusual, so I decided to bring it back with me," said Sergey Semenov, the mountain-climber who made the find.

Although the foot looks more like a paw, local scientists see more than that.

"It looks very human.  There are many similarities," said Yuriy Malofeyev, vice-president of the Russian association of veterinary anatomists.

The discovery has already been labeled as the "foot of the Yeti" by locals, but as to what it really is, we simply may never know.

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