Posted on 10/12/2021 3:19:31 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
The southern cassowary is an enormous, flightless bird native to the forests of New Guinea and Northern Australia...
While one should certainly be wary around a cassowary and its dagger-like claws today, a new study found that humans may have raised the territorial, aggressive birds 18,000 years ago in New Guinea...
"This behavior that we are seeing is coming thousands of years before the domestication of the chicken," says study author Kristina Douglass, a Penn State archaeologist, in a statement. "And this is not some small fowl, it is a huge, ornery, flightless bird that can eviscerate you. Most likely the dwarf variety that weighs 20 kilos (44 pounds)."
Researchers excavating two rock shelters in New Guinea found 1,000 fragments of fossilized cassowary eggshells. To get a closer look at the ancient shell pieces, the team used three-dimensional imaging, computer modeling, and studied egg morphology of modern cassowary eggs and other birds, like emus and ostriches. Using carbon dating, the eggs are estimated to be 6,000 to 18,000 years old...
Early humans may have foraged for eggs to raise the chicks for feathers and meat, or they may have harvested and ate late-stage fertilized eggs, known as balut, reports Joanna Thompson for Live Science. Balut is still eaten today as street food in some parts of Asia, per a statement.
"What we found was that a large majority of the eggshells were harvested during late stages," says Douglass in a statement. "The eggshells look very late; the pattern is not random. They were either into eating baluts, or they are hatching chicks."
(Excerpt) Read more at smithsonianmag.com ...
And for dessert, lady fingers!
With an oyster stuffing...
Sounds like the cassowary owned him!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jB2QFmXUCo
They’ll stalk people to drive them out of their territory.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUQDA48tQhs
Here is one that I saw at a theme park. During one of the shows, it was much more ornery than you see in this show, and would jump up to claw the guy and he’d push it back whenever it jumped, knocking it off balance enough that it couldn’t reach him to slash him.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f011zAbc7es
Is that the one that it killed him through the fence?
LOL
Interesting video. Looks like they cut off the long claw…not that the other ones are a piece of cake.
There was an Emu running loose here in the mountains for a year.
Somebody had exotic critters and moved and just let it go because western MD winters are just perfect for Emus. [not]
NO ONE I called would come to capture it before something terrible happened to it.
Not the humane society, not the DNR, not even any of the LEO branches.
They all said the same thing “Those things will disembowel you!”
Eventually I stopped seeing it.
No idea where it went.
I cannot overstate how surrealistic it was, to be riding home one day and to glance over and see an Emu standing in a cow pasture.
I had to swing around and go back just to make sure I hadn’t gone mad.
o.O
A murder of crows.
*Word
A guy up the coast went into sepsis after his Reeve’s Pheasant spurred him good and hard in the thigh. About 4 pounds of very mean rooster. They never really tame down. I’ve known ordinary roosters to be incredibly hostile. One guy used to put a bucket over his jungle fowl rooster every time he went into the coop.
The bird is the word.😋
I’m reporting you to the Audubon Society, bird basher.
The bird is the word!
Ive heard it happens to wild animals too. They get lured out of the wild to the farm by easy food and clean water but not being used to the terrain and with all that equipment laying around they tend to trip and fall right into the oven.
They’d have needed a really fast oven.
That thing could run.
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