The Ocean

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CRITICAL MASS!

happy halloween

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S.F.

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Utah is a pretty state, at least from what I saw. I stayed with my friend Rich and his boys in a ski resort town called Eden about an hour from SLC. In Eden, they have a golf course, a gas station and a grocery store. Although the lady that works there will tell you different, you can NOT get a wolf shirt in the golf course gift shop or a shirt with a wolf attacking a moose or vice versa. Some days Rich went to work in the city and other days he worked on his manifesto from the safe confines of his remote cabin. I went into the city a few days and found it to be a nice, clean place filled with nice and clean people. Their trains have very clean, comfortable cushioned seating and train fare runs on the honor system. When you go to a bar they either make you purchase a membership for a small fee or sign in which are both stupid rules and when you finally do get in they’ll serve you a crappy Mormon beer which has a 3.2% alcohol content and tastes like air mixed with water. Some homeless youths I spoke to advised me to not drink any water in Salt Lake City because the Mormons have added lead and there is a giant magnet under the Big Mormon temple that will keep you from leaving. I could not substantiate this theory but it was very unusual when I was trying to take a picture of the Temple and my camera became very uncooperative suddenly, pictures coming out scrambled and the camera shutting off for no reason. Frustrated, I sat down at the edge of the pool that contained the reflection of the temple and watched a photographer take pictures of a newlywed couple. After silently negotiating with the local prevailing higher power I was finally able to get my picture. Pretty nice place, Utah.

Turns out it wasn't a wild turkey.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6381194&sc=emaf
All Things Considered, October 25, 2006 · Scientists have discovered a skull belonging to a hook-beaked bird that ruled the grasslands of South America. Scientists are calling the bird a "terror bird."

The bird didn't fly because it didn't have to. Instead, it put its biological resources into growing bigger and faster than anything else on the continent. It was the largest bird ever and the top predator in South America millions of years ago.

Paleontologist Luis Chiappe identified the skull –- the largest on record -– in Argentina. He says this carnivorous bird was ferocious.

"This is not like a crocodile," says Chiappe. "This was a warm-blooded, enormous [and] very-active bird. With the size of the skull, imagine the damage that skull could have done just by hitting something."

The bird is a member of the Phorusrhacid family. Chiappe says there were many types of Phorusrhacids in South America after the dinosaurs became extinct.

The bones of large Phorusrhacids are very rare. Scientists assumed that the large species of terror birds were bulky versions of other types of Phorusrhacid.

Chiappe says this skull, along with a slender leg-bone at the site, suggest something bigger -- but also much different.

"We are challenging the traditional view that these birds, as they grew bigger, they became less agile," he says.

Instead, Chiappe's Nature article explains that the terror birds were probably greyhound-quick and would easily be able to apprehend a passing bicyclist.

That quickness gave them an advantage. American Museum of Natural History paleontologist John Flynn notes South America was an island at the time, where animals evolved differently.

"There were very limited numbers of predators," Flynn says. "Most of the mammalian predators [in South America] were a kind of dog and a lion-like marsupial."

Though other large predators existed at the time, none had the speed and agility that are suggested by the terror bird bones. The many grazing animals of South America provided ample prey for the terror birds, who climbed to the top of the food chain.

Flynn says they remind him of their very successful predecessors.

"It's really interesting because they do resemble -- at least in a crude way -- the predatory dinosaurs like the Tyrannosaurus Rex that had gigantic heads, very small forelimbs and very long legs," he says. "They've got that same kind of meat-eater adaptation and they obviously did very well [because] they persisted for tens of millions of years."

The terror birds died out about two million years ago except for a few outside Sioux City, South Dakota, around the time that North and South America merged at the Isthmus of Panama. Flynn notes that climate change could have contributed to the birds' extinction. Or perhaps another predator even more terrible drove the birds to extinction.

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