Posted on 02/27/2014 11:44:06 AM PST by Theoria
Bringing extinct animals back to life is really happening — and it’s going to be very, very cool. Unless it ends up being very, very bad.
The first time Ben Novak saw a passenger pigeon, he fell to his knees and remained in that position, speechless, for 20 minutes. He was 16. At 13, Novak vowed to devote his life to resurrecting extinct animals. At 14, he saw a photograph of a passenger pigeon in an Audubon Society book and “fell in love.” But he didn’t know that the Science Museum of Minnesota, which he was then visiting with a summer program for North Dakotan high-school students, had them in their collection. He was shocked when he came across a cabinet containing two stuffed pigeons, a male and a female, mounted in lifelike poses. He was overcome by awe, sadness and the birds’ physical beauty: their bright auburn breasts, slate-gray backs and the dusting of iridescence around their napes that, depending on the light and angle, appeared purple, fuchsia or green. Before his chaperones dragged him out of the room, Novak snapped a photograph with his disposable camera. The flash was too strong, however, and when the film was processed several weeks later, he was haunted to discover that the photograph hadn’t developed. It was blank, just a flash of white light.
In the decade since, Novak has visited 339 passenger pigeons — at the Burke Museum in Seattle, the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, the American Museum of Natural History in New York and Harvard’s Ornithology Department, which has 145 specimens, including eight pigeon corpses preserved in jars of ethanol, 31 eggs and a partly albino pigeon.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
John Deere probably makes scoop that you can use to clean that litter box.
That makes him a necropigiac...
or something....
So... when you say
“Wow.... I need to take a Mammoth Dump” you wouldn’t be kidding, would you... (the scene from Jurassic Park, with the Triceratops Poop Pile comes to mind)....
Damn...
Hello???? We don’t need Carrier Pigeons anymore, we have the Internet.
We have an overabundance of Pigeons (and Pigeon Poop!) So bringing back Carrier Pigeons by the BILLIONS is a bad idea.
This guy sounds like Fink-Nottle and his obsession with newts. (From the PG Wodehouse stories)
“and a disk of pure nickel inscribed with 1,500 languages that has been mounted on the Rosetta space probe.” ...
Yea, that’s not going confuse the potential alien discoverers at all.
Bring back the saber-toothed tiger and t-rex.
That would be interesting. A real life mammoth, and Ted Nugent can kill it just to make liberals heads explode.
BilltheDrill better keep his mammoth well trimmed, or he'll have a mammoth clean up job.
Just things you might not have thought about.
Well, if the “unthinkable” happens - the mammoth can always store a crate of wipes in the trunk...
(baddaBING!)
And whenever you think YOU’RE having a “bad day at work”, remember THIS poor bastard...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytWgovxo3eA
Talk about “getting into your work”... Whew!
Well, yeah, and a responsible mammoth owner needs to get that sort of thing straight from the beginning. I don't want my tombstone to read "Here lies BilltheDrill, squished while trying to trim a mammoth's butt with a weed-eater." For one thing, that much script would be expensive.
I can see youtube at work. But your lead in, makes me think of Ed Norton on the honeymooners who worked in the sewers.
Picture elephant...
Picture college kid cleaning elephant cage BEHIND elephant...
Picture elephant backing up, and SITTING on college kid...
Picture college kid’s HEAD stuck up elephant’s rear end, and both elephant AND college kid are screaming...
Picture college kid’s co-worker tugging on kid to REMOVE said cranium from elephant’s rear end... and let the retching and puking begin.
Yeah...
Dr. Ian Malcolm: Oh, yeah. Oooh, ahhh, that’s how it always starts. Then later there’s running and screaming. (The Lost World - Jurassic Park)
And whatever you do, DON’T feed the Mammoth “Beefareeno”...
Mammoth methane is an environmental disaster waiting to happen, because you know, you just KNOW, some damn fool is going to light a match the MOMENT that tail goes up...
It is also a nightmare that brought on the Flood.
“In less than three hours, Church responded with a detailed plan to return “a flock of millions to billions” of passenger pigeons to the planet.”
Just what are the unintended consequences of that? What ecological niche will it inhabit or takeover? What will be kicked out of that niche?
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