The Nightly Quill

Watch closely! Unbelievable !!

Karl Szmolinsky, 67, has been breeding German grey giant bunnies — among the world’s biggest — for more than 40 years.

But he caught the attention of the reclusive communist state last year when he won a competition in his home state of Brandenburg with a rabbit called Robert, weighing in at a hefty 10.5 kilogrammes (23 pounds). Local newspaper coverage of the giant bunny was picked up by a North Korean television crew and the word spread. “A delegation from the North Korean embassy came to the house in November. They were interested in the rabbits and kept repeating in German, ‘kilo, kilo, meat, meat’,” Szmolinsky said.

The rabbits are startlingly big – roughly the size of a small pig. “One adult animal can feed a family of six,” Szmolinsky said.
He struck a generous deal with the North Koreans, who bought 12 rabbits for 80 euros (104 dollars) each compared with the price he charges to German breeders of between 200 and 250 euros. “I was delighted with their offer. I want to help the North Korean people because it’s a very poor country. “I’m doing this for the children and the people who are hungry, because having lived through the war as a child I know what hunger is.” Read the rest of this entry »

Stevie demonstrates a remarkably bizarre talent. He is nicknamed: “The Human Regurgitator”

A maggot couldn’t ask for a better friend than Rebecca O’Flaherty. She helps kids appreciate the larval stage of flies, teaching children how to dip maggots into nontoxic paint and set them on paper to writhe away, creating “maggot art.”

She teaches law enforcement officers how to recognize, collect and preserve maggots and other insect evidence that can help establish time of death.

And she’s devoted years of her life to studying maggot habits, working toward a doctorate in entomology at UC Davis.

O’Flaherty wants people to better understand the insects that tidy up the world’s oozing messes.

“We’d be knee-deep in garbage … if we didn’t have them to clean it up,” she said.

Maggot art is the hook, and it’s a grabber. A piece of O’Flaherty’s art has been part of the scenery on “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation,” hanging on the office wall of fictional TV investigator Gil Grissom. In Sacramento, O’Flaherty and two friends just opened a maggot art exhibit at the Capital Athletic Club, where their work’s squiggling, swooping lines decorate a hallway gallery that leads to the swimming pool.

Beyond the art are more serious goals: Help forensic entomology shed its academic image of too much flash, too little substance. Help answer some of the questions that are vitally important to detective work, such as how temperature affects maggot growth.

Read the rest of this entry »

Scientists have unearthed the fossil of a young, two-headed marine reptile that lived when dinosaurs still walked the Earth.

“My first reaction when I saw that fossil was of the ‘Oh my God!’ type,” said lead researcher Eric Buffetaut of the Center for National Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris, France. “It’s something you would not really expect to see, because the chances of such a freak being fossilized are so slim.”

The discovery, detailed in of the Feb. 22 issue of the journal Biology Letters, marks the earliest known occurrence of a well-known birth defect, called axial bifurcation, in living reptiles. This double-noggin phenomenon occurs when an embryo is damaged and some body parts develop twice.

Buffetaut and his colleagues uncovered the remains [image] in the Yixian Formation in northeastern China, a rich fossil deposit famous for its treasure trove of feathered dinosaur and early bird remains. The creature, called Hyphalosaurus lingyuanensis, died at a young age during the Cretaceous period 120 million years ago, during the twilight of the dinosaur’s reign.

While a reptile, Hyphalosaurus was not a dinosaur. Instead, it belonged to a diverse group of primitive aquatic and semi-aquatic creatures called choristoderes. Some choristoderes looked like lizards or crocodiles, while others resembled miniature versions of plesiosaurs, ancient marine reptiles with barrel-shaped bodies, short tails, paddle-like limbs and, in some cases, long serpentine necks–somewhat like the mythical Loch Ness monster.

Hyphalosaurus belonged to this last class of choristoderes. While the two-headed fossil was just over three inches long, an adult Hyphalosaurus could grow up to three feet in length and would have looked like a baby Nessie [image].

“But the limbs were not flipper-like as in plesiosaurs,” Buffetaut said. “They were similar to lizard limbs.”

How the creature died is unclear. “It seems to have been a hatchling, and perhaps it was still-born,” Buffetaut told LiveScience. “In any case it didn’t live long.”

The new baby Hyphalosaurus specimen not only had two heads; it also had two necks. While rare, this kind of malformation is well known among modern-day reptiles, including lizards, snakes, turtles and tortoises.

Two-headed mammals, including sheep, calves and kittens, are also known but these animals don’t typically live as long.

“Two-headed reptiles manage to survive for some time, probably because they have less complex brains and behaviors than birds or mammals,” Buffetaut said.

This is hilarious:

An African lion has been filmed ‘embracing’ the woman who nursed him back to health in an animal shelter in Colombia. Ana Julia Torres runs the Villa Lorena shelter for abandoned and maltreated animals.

It never pays to be a bully

This dog knows what’s good for him