ausfire Posted February 22, 2018 Share Posted February 22, 2018 Made this cassowary from some scrap and donated it to our local railway restoration group. Adds a bit of interest to the station platform. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tubalcain2 Posted February 22, 2018 Share Posted February 22, 2018 Nice work. How come you Aussies get all the cool looking animals? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Daninghram Posted February 22, 2018 Share Posted February 22, 2018 That is so cool! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Daswulf Posted February 22, 2018 Share Posted February 22, 2018 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. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ThomasPowers Posted February 22, 2018 Share Posted February 22, 2018 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...) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JHCC Posted February 22, 2018 Share Posted February 22, 2018 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. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ThomasPowers Posted February 22, 2018 Share Posted February 22, 2018 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! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John in Oly, WA Posted February 22, 2018 Share Posted February 22, 2018 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? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ThomasPowers Posted February 22, 2018 Share Posted February 22, 2018 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. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Marc1 Posted February 22, 2018 Share Posted February 22, 2018 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. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Buzzkill Posted February 22, 2018 Share Posted February 22, 2018 True. I've seen the Far Side cartoon. Dinosaurs all went extinct because they were smokers. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ausfire Posted February 24, 2018 Author Share Posted February 24, 2018 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. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SLAG Posted February 24, 2018 Share Posted February 24, 2018 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. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John in Oly, WA Posted February 28, 2018 Share Posted February 28, 2018 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. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ausfire Posted February 28, 2018 Author Share Posted February 28, 2018 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 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Daswulf Posted February 28, 2018 Share Posted February 28, 2018 Thanks for the read Aus. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John in Oly, WA Posted February 28, 2018 Share Posted February 28, 2018 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. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Marc1 Posted March 1, 2018 Share Posted March 1, 2018 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. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ausfire Posted March 1, 2018 Author Share Posted March 1, 2018 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! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ThomasPowers Posted March 1, 2018 Share Posted March 1, 2018 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. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cathsonn Posted July 6, 2018 Share Posted July 6, 2018 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 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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