Coffee and Provocation

A Bone Economy: A nice story about the business of collecting and selling buffalo bones for fertilizer after we had shot all the buffalo out. A parable for the modern economy?  Maybe not.  Some say that the buffalo were not shot out -- that they were wiped out by a series of tick-borne plagues.  More on that in a later post.

A New Monkey Species?  It looks like a new species of owl monkey has been discoved in the Congo.

Jack Russell is the kicker for the Badgers. You cannot make this stuff up.

First they banned all badger-hunting with dogs.  Then, when the British found themselves ass-deep in badger, many of which (allegedly) carry brucelosis tuberculosis to cattle, they had to figure out how to locally reduce the badger population.  The answer?  Not to open licensed and regulated hunting in cattle country (far too logical!).  Instead, the British have engineered a massive badger cull in which farmers and activists are sure to clash. 

Raiders of the Lost Ark was not entirely fiction.  It seems the Nazis did send out archeological expeditions all over the globe, and on one of them they collected a 1,000 year old statue of a Bhudda made out of a meteorite and with a swastika (Indian version) on it.

File in the folder marked "sh*t happens".  French Hunter shot by dog loses his hand.

How thick is rhinocerous skin?  Pretty darn thick!  Here's a picture from the blog entitled "What's in John's Freezer?"

A "jerky renaissance"?  The Wall Street Journal says such a thing is underway as people discover that lean, dry, seasoned meat is a perfectly fine health food.   "Meat jerky is like Greek yogurt for men," says one sales researcher.

A Moose Message for the Gods?  In the Ural mountains, a gigantic Stone Age chalk carving of a two kilometre-long moose, similar to the chalk carvings seen in Britain, could be the oldest ever discovered in the world.

Urban and suburban coyotes appear to mate for life.   It seems that trait is part of their evolutionary success. 
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