February 22, 20188 yr Made this cassowary from some scrap and donated it to our local railway restoration group. Adds a bit of interest to the station platform.
February 22, 20188 yr I had to look that one up. The chain worked out great. I'm sure it was a bear welding it all up. Awesome job. I'm sure it will get a lot of attention and many pictures with smiling people beside it.
February 22, 20188 yr Ought to be a donation box by it; "Please feed the animals/railroad..." North America *had* a lot of cool animals in it: giant ground sloths, saber tooth tigers, mastodons and mammoths, three toed horses...There is a strong theory that they are no longer here because our ancestors ate them....(The climate change theory is not as strong as it would have been easy for cold weather animals to move north into Canada as things warmed up...)
February 22, 20188 yr 1 hour ago, ThomasPowers said: There is a strong theory that they are no longer here because our ancestors ate them The Cleveland Museum of Natural History has some mastadon bones that show butchering marks. Apparently the legs were missing when they found the skeleton, and the theory is that they were removed for eating somewhere separate from the kill site.
February 22, 20188 yr As I recall some of the Clovis points were recovered in situ in various megafauna. I've visited the Blackwater Draw site; would not chose to excavate it in the summertime!
February 22, 20188 yr Nice sculpture Aus! Does cassowary taste good? Must not, since it's still there. So the deer and elk and bear etc. in North America are the bad tasting animals? That's why they're still here, cuz our ancestors didn't want to eat them?
February 22, 20188 yr Cost benefit ratio: feed a lot more people a lot longer with a single mastodon; also the herbivores tend to have high replacement rates as compared to the others. Deer certainly have managed to boom their population even with car predation in places like Ohio.
February 22, 20188 yr Megafauna needs megaflora. Megaflora needs mega CO2 to grow mega. CO2 depends from Sun activity (yes, too bad for A.G.) Sun cools down, everything follows. Smaller animals adapt better to changes in food source. As much as some current alternative religions like to pin all on man, there wasn't enough of us in those days to make a dent in any population.
February 22, 20188 yr True. I've seen the Far Side cartoon. Dinosaurs all went extinct because they were smokers.
February 24, 20188 yr Author On 23/02/2018 at 12:55 AM, Daswulf said: I had to look that one up. The chain worked out great. I'm sure it was a bear welding it all up. Awesome job. I'm sure it will get a lot of attention and many pictures with smiling people beside it. Actually the chains are only welded along the backbone and part way down the sides. In a good wind they shake a little. And yes, train passengers have already been photographing it, and it's only been there a day or so. John, I don't know what cassowary tastes like - never had the opportunity to try it. They are becoming quite rare and endangered in some areas of North Queensland, so you wouldn't want to be caught with one on the spit. They are not the brightest of birds and suffer a lot from road strikes. People are discouraged from feeding them, as they can be very aggressive and those claws can do major damage.
February 24, 20188 yr Dinosaurs died out about 65 million years ago. Man, (Homo sapiens), has lived on this planet for about only 2 millions on this planet. People and dinosaurs never lived together in the same epoch. I had a wiki look at the "Far Side" author's wikipedia biography entry. He has a good knowledge of anthropology. Indeed his wife is an anthropologist & was/is his business manager. He retired in 1995. Cassaowary are impressive birds. But, as with all the flightless ratite bird family (ostriches, kiwi, rheas are members of that family), they are not very clever. They often have a nasty temper. And those claws can rip open a man's belly. So they are best admired from a distance. Try https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratite, The article features a good picture of the beast. Back to blacksmithing. Aus. the sculpture is magnificent. You did a great job. SLAG.
February 28, 20188 yr On 2/24/2018 at 1:30 AM, ausfire said: I don't know what cassowary tastes like... They are becoming quite rare... I'll just stick with the chicken they probably taste just like.
February 28, 20188 yr Author 2 hours ago, John in Oly, WA said: I'll just stick with the chicken they probably taste just like. Well, they reckon they taste a lot stronger than chicken, and the meat even makes some people dizzy. There's some interesting stuff about cassowaries (including a pic of one being cooked) here: http://www.amazingaustralia.com.au/animals/cassowary.htm
February 28, 20188 yr I was just poking fun at the common response, about what something exotic tastes like, i.e. rattlesnake, frogs legs, etc. is "tastes just like chicken". Wonder what's in them that makes some people dizzy.
March 1, 20188 yr 6 hours ago, ausfire said: Well, they reckon they taste a lot stronger than chicken, and the meat even makes some people dizzy. There's some interesting stuff about cassowaries (including a pic of one being cooked) here: http://www.amazingaustralia.com.au/animals/cassowary.htm That article is very interesting but contains a few inaccuracies. The name cassowary comes from the Malay language Kasuari. The cassowary was known to exist way before captain cook's time and was classified by Linneo in a book published in 1748. The bird existed in the Indian archipelago and has a few different subspecies. Our Casuarina tree (She oak) gets its name from the similarity between it's foliage and the bird's feathers. Who was first if the casuarina or the Kasuari ... i don't know.
March 1, 20188 yr Author 10 hours ago, John in Oly, WA said: I was just poking fun at the common response, about what something exotic tastes like, i.e. rattlesnake, frogs legs, etc. is "tastes just like chicken". Wonder what's in them that makes some people dizzy. Yes, I noted the reference to chicken as the common response. Echidna is supposed to 'taste just like chicken' too. Don't know where the dizziness comes from. If the meat is consumed in PNG it might be the kava they drink with it!
March 1, 20188 yr May be based on the diet of the individual bird too. I know that quail feeding on poison hemlock can affect the eater as well.
July 6, 20188 yr Another excellent sculpture Aus... as for eating one, if you can catch one without it killing you, you would be doing well. Helped a fauna park try to move a male into the females enclosure. It kicked apart a steel gate made of 2inch gauge solid steel square bar. Then tried to kill the female... Dangerous animals when they want to be
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