Showing posts with label Hunter. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hunter. Show all posts
Saturday, March 29, 2014
Monday, October 14, 2013
Hunter, 72, survives 19 days in snowy California wilderness
(Reuters) – A 72-year-old California deer hunter was recovering Monday after surviving on squirrels and packing leaves around him for warmth for nearly three weeks while he was lost and alone in the snowy wilderness, authorities said.
Gene Penaflor was discovered by hunters on Saturday after 19 days in the Mendocino National Forest in the Coastal Mountain Range of northwestern California, according to a report by the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office.
“This is a miracle,” reads a message on a website dedicated to the search, www.genepenaflor.com, updated with a family photo at a local hospital over the weekend.
The Mendocino National Forest is run by the U.S. Forest Service and has been closed due to the government shutdown, according to the forest website. An outgoing voicemail message by a forest spokesperson said she had been furloughed.
Penaflor, described on the site as an avid hunter with more than 30 years of wilderness experience, had been hunting with a friend when they became separated on September 24, the report said.
After four days of searching by at least 18 agencies from more than a dozen counties, the official search was suspended because searchers could find no clues to his locations and because storms were coming.
On Saturday, 19 days after Penaflor disappeared, the search was resumed – but it was a group of hunters who heard Penaflor’s cries for help and eventually found him in a canyon in the 53,887-acre Yuki Wilderness area of the national forest.
He told officials he had walked too far away from the road, fell and hit his head, and was knocked unconscious. When he regained consciousness he was disoriented, surrounded by thick fog in a forest where the temperature dipped to 25 degrees.
“He was able to make a fire and warm himself with leaves and grasses that he packed around his body,” the report said. “On days when it rained or snowed he was able to crawl under a large log to stay dry. He was able to kill and eat several squirrels in the area and there was plenty of water in a nearby drainage to sustain himself.”
Penaflor is recovering well, according to social media postings by his son, Jeremy Penaflor.
“My dad was found alive and well!” the younger Penaflor said on Twitter on Saturday. “God is good.”
(Editing by Andrew Hay)
Reuters: Oddly Enough
Hunter, 72, survives 19 days in snowy California wilderness
Tuesday, July 16, 2013
Om Nom Nom: T. Rex Was, Indeed, A Voracious Hunter
Mind The Teeth: Fossils indicate that Tyrannosaurus rex was an active hunter, in addition to being a scavenger. And in Jurassic Park, it also had a sweet tooth for lawyers.
Universal Pictures/Getty Images
Tyrannosaurus rex is perhaps one of the most famous animals to have ever roamed the Earth. This huge, fierce, meat-eater has graced Hollywood films as the perpetual villain, and it has played a notorious role in the science community that studies it, too.
Despite its vicious depiction in pop culture, paleobiologists have debated the feeding behavior of T. rex over the last 100 years, ever since the first evidence of the animal was discovered in the early 1900s. Some scientists have a bone to pick with the tyrant king’s predatory reputation, and have suggested the dinosaur was actually a scavenger — more like a vulture when it came to whetting its appetite.
“ Bones fossilize really well, but unfortunately behavior really doesn’t.
But results from a recent discovery might settle this debate. Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, University of Kansas paleontologist David Burnham and one of his graduate students report a strange-looking fossil with something buried between two tail bones from a duck-billed, plant-eating dinosaur called the Hadrosaur.
After they scanned it with a medical imaging machine, they figured out it was a tooth.
“Once we realized it was a tooth, we looked at each other and said, ‘Wouldn’t it just be great if it was a T. rex?’ ” Burnham says.
As luck would have it, it really was a Tyrannosaur tooth. T. rex teeth are very distinctive: they’re sharp, serrated and long. Some scientists call them “lethal bananas.”
Burnham and his team were excited because this tooth that was stuck in a portion of tail bone might have been the piece of evidence they needed. “We’d finally be able to put the nail in the coffin for the scavenger theory.”
A T. rex tooth in the tail doesn’t prove the dinosaur actually killed the Hadrosaur. Maybe the Hadrosaur was already dead and the T. Rex just found it, chowed down on the carcass, and broke off a tooth. But in this case, the Hadrosaur’s bone had fused around the T. rex tooth, a sign that the would had healed. So apparently the Hadrosaur survived an attack and got away, with a tooth stuck in its tail.
“It’s the bullet from the smoking gun,” Burnham says. “Here you have attempted murder and here we are able to identify the perpetrator.” Another damning piece of evidence, Burnham notes, is that the wound is on the tail, which is typical of where predators bring down running prey.
A mangled piece of proof like the Hadrosaur bone isn’t easy to come by, says Greg Erickson, a professor of anatomy and vertebrate paleontology at Florida State University.
“Bones fossilize really well, but unfortunately behavior doesn’t,” he says.
That might be why proof of T. rex’s eating habits has been so difficult to pin down, and why scientists are somewhat in the dark when it comes to definitively pegging T. rex as a strict predator.
The real T. rex may have been a more complicated animal than the one depicted in Hollywood films like Jurassic Park. Like most predators today, the dinosaur was probably both predator and scavenger.
“So what T. rex did more of is really the key, and to me this debate is not solved,” Erickson says. “From this, all we can say is ‘Yes, T. rex acted like a predator.’ We have cases where there are hundreds, sometimes thousands of duck-billed dinosaurs that died, and these animals were clearly fed upon by Tyrannosaurs. We find tooth marks and shed teeth among the skeletons.”
This all might seem to be an academic debate, but there is a real-world reason why scientists want to know what T. rex ate and when. Knowing more about the T. rex appetite might help explain the prehistoric food chain from millions of years ago, and how one big dinosaur influenced it.
Om Nom Nom: T. Rex Was, Indeed, A Voracious Hunter
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