We love animals here at Greenpacks.We don’t like when they are abused, mistreated and exploited. And that includes goat fighting.

Goat fighting?

I had never heard of the practice until just yesterday when I happened upon a short article in at a Chinese news site that I look at from time to time.

I suppose if we look around to most cultures we will find that there is fighting going on for sport … among animals trained to do so.

Thank goodness we are not so depraved in America. We just let people beat on each other. But, then there’s Michael Vick and the dog fighting and …

Why can’t we all just get along? [via Sina]

Barack Obama’s girls Malia, 10, and Sasha, 7, got a dog as their Easter present. After months of anticipation, they got a 6-year old portuguese water dog and named him, Bo.

A gift from Senator Ted Kennedy (who owns other three), the First Puppy has been bred at a kennel in Texas.

Although local shelters close to the White House hoped that the Obamas will adopt a pup from them, Bo is now ruling the domain with its tuxedo-black fur, a white chest, white paws and a rakish white goatee.

Cute and with an atitude, Bo is already famous, but we think he’ll definitely have to take some lessons for standing in a picture from now on.

Some serious proof has been uncovered by the Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany.

The group has learned that wild female chimpanzees copulate more frequently with males who share meat with them over long periods of time. In other words, men that share, get it more often. (Can you imagine the guy sitting out in the wild counting how many times Rosy the Ape copulated this month?)

Scientists (ahem) have long puzzled about this. They believe that men who are more successful hunters get more wives and a larger number of offspring. Let’s see. Men who do their jobs well get better wives. And people study this over while sitting in bushes? Come on!

Studies on wild chimpanzees show that male hunters share meat (not that meat) with females who did not participate in the hunt. One hypotheses proposed is meat-for-sex. But evidence doesn’t really support the claim though males, both humans and chimpanzees want the support.

In research conducted in the Tai National Park, Coted’Ivoire, it was found that females copulate more frequently with males who share meat with them on at least one occasion. Males who never shared never had sex. Well, duh!!

Gomes said: “Our results strongly suggest that wild chimpanzees exchange meat for sex, and do so on a long-term basis. Males who shared meat with females doubled their mating success, whereas females, who had difficulty obtaining meat on their own, increased their caloric intake, without suffering the energetic costs and potential risk of injury related to hunting.”

“Previous studies might not have found a relationship between mating success and meat sharing because they focused on short-term exchanges; or perhaps because in those groups access to females was driven by male coercion so females rarely chose their mating partners,” she added.

The conclusion: “Our findings add to the ever-growing evidence suggesting that chimpanzees can think in the past and the future and that this influences their present behavior.”

So, “where’s my meat?”

A monster predator with a circular jaw and a pair of claws on its head has been discovered in old collections of the Smithsonian museum in Washington.

Fragments of the monster were unearthed in 1912 somewhere in Canada’s 505 million-year-old Burgess Shale site. Researchers are first thought they were part of a crustacean-like animal.

When researchers discovered more complete specimens in the 1990’s they realized fossils that were previously classified as jellyfish, sea cucumbers and other anthropods were more likely an entirely new beast.

The new monster – Hurdia victoria – has a segmented body covered with gills and a huge three-part carapace, or shell, that projects out from the front of its head, according to the study published in the peer-reviewed journal Science.

Allison Daley has been studying the fossils for three years as part of her doctoral thesis.

“The use of the large carapace extending from the front of its head is a mystery. In many animals, a shell or carapace is used to protect the soft-parts of the body, as you would see in a crab or lobster, but this structure in Hurdia is empty and does not cover or protect the rest of the body. We can only guess at what its function might have been.”

A team of researchers from Canada, Britain and the United States reclassified the fossils after studying several hundred specimens found in the Burgess Shale.

Hurdia and Anomalocaris are believed to both be early offshoots of the evolutionary lineage that led to arthropods -spiders, crustaceans, insects, millipedes and centipedes.

The things scientists can determine from looking at rocks continues to amaze me.

Really.

I’ve tried doing that. I look at the backs of people and wonder what their fronts look like. I NEVER get it right. How can these folks determine what the skin on a rock looked like? I don’t get it.

Really.

Yo mamma is so fat that she has her own zip code.
Yo mamma is so fat that people sit next to her at the beach to get some shade.
Yo mamma is so fat that 20 Greenpeacers tried to throw her back into the ocean.

Funny.

Not funny… about 80 long-finned whales beached themselves in Hamelin Bay, Western Australia. Five bottlenose dolphins joined them in the mass suicide.

Workers were able to get 14 whales and four dolphins back to the sea when they were taken to calmer seas.

Scientists offer some theories as to why the whales beach themselves:

1. chased by predators
2. chasing prey
3. sonar used for navigation is hindered by natural geomagnetic factors
4. bad directions
5. following an ill or injured pod member into danger and refusing to leave it
6. human activity – undersea exploration, sonar from submarines

Since last November about 520 whales have beached themselves. More than 470 have died.

“We’re in a peak period now,” said Evans, of Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization. “What happens in that period is the climate factors increase the prey field near the shore, forcing whales closer to shore and thereby increasing the probability that they will strand.”

There is a cycle of such activities by the whales dating back to the 1920s. Maybe something can be discovered by studying that.

Let’s hope so.

We love babies. Babies are all about hope for the future. You can’t help but think all will be well, or dang it!, we’d best clean up our act so we can make things better so our little ones will have a home here on Earth to enjoy when they are old enough to have their own offspring.

Baby siberian tiger cubs can be seen in Harbin, China. The three cubs must be bottle fed since their mother can’t produce milk. That’s how it is supposed to work. People and animals are to be friends. [Sina]

There’s a baby hippo – yeah, hippos can be small sometimes, too, at least in the beginning. This little fellow was born in the Assam State Zoo and Botanical gardens in Guwahati, India. [Xinhuanet]

This baby elephant gets to enjoy a block of ice on Thailand’s National Elephant Day in Ayutthaya Elephant Palace & Royal Kraal. Yum! [Xinhuanet]

Finally – snow monkeys enjoy an onsen (hot spring) in Jigokudani Monkey Park in Shiga Kogen, Nagano Prefecture, Japan. One little guy has the see no evil part down, eh? [JapanToday]

What do you think about when you see babies, animal or otherwise?

Koala bears – those cute little fuzzy creatures, half squirrel, half bear, half something else from down under. Every zoo wants some, until now.

It costs more to feed six koalas at Osaka’s Tennoji Zoo than to feed the rest of the zoo’s animals put together. That comes to Y92million ($950,000) a year to feed them or $160,000 each per year = $450/day per animal. And the Tennoji Zoo spends Y85 million on all the other animals it cares for.

The fuzzy wuzzies feast on Eucalyptus trees which are cultivated in only seven locations in Japan. Hey! I have one in my front yard!

Koalas apparently only eat about 50 eucalyptus species, introduced to them by their mothers when they are still in their mother’s pouches.

It all boils down to how much zoo visitors are willing to shell out to see the little rascals and whether or not it adds up to the cost to feed and care for them.

After all, it’s always about the money. Isn’t it?

Images by FrankMaurer, jcolman, alumroot

A team of Chinese and American scientists excavated some well-preserved fossils in the Gobi Desert. The team says the herd of ostrich-like sinornithomimus lived some 90 million years ago.

“This is a very exciting discovery, because 99.9 percent of the time, we find a group of skeletons that died at different periods due to unknown causes,” said Paul Sereno, a University of Chicago professor on the excavation team. “The other 0.1 percent of the time, scientists consider themselves lucky to find small herds that have been well-preserved after floods or volcanic eruptions, similar to that of Pompeii.”

Twenty five young sinornithomimus were found near Suhongtu, a tiny, remote village in the Gobi desert about 370 miles (600 kilometers) west of Hohhot.

The scientists concocted a story saying the position of the dinosaur bones suggest the animals were looking for water at the edge of a lake, got stuck in mud and drowned in the mud.

Another paleontologist says the youngsters were left behind by their parents.

I like a good story as much as the next guy … but how do they know these things?

There’s a city in Japan called Oyashirazu. Oya = parent. Shirazu = don’t know. The city is named because a high tide came in as a parent and child were swimming together. The mother hurried to safety but forgot about her child as if she didn’t know she had a child to take care of.

Did these sinornithomimus (Chinese bird mimic) leave us a story to tell, too?

Image by pnp

There’s scientific proof that humans did not evolve from chimpanzees at Sweden’s Furuvik Zoo.

Researchers watched Santino the chimp’s anti-social behavior and studied the 31-year old alpha-male over the years – 10 years to be somewhat exact.

Santino never attacked others in his group probably because he was comfortable being the head banana … or getting his bananas first.

What shocked the researchers was that Santino would collect rocks each morning, even knocking out disks from concrete boulders, then store them until midday. At midday, visitors would come to the zoo and Santino would start throwing the rocks at the monkeys on the other side of the fence. He never hit anyone, well hardly ever. But, the fact that the chump, chimp planned ahead stunned the researchers. They concluded that humans could not have evolved from chimps because how many humans do you know who plan ahead? And if humans did plan ahead, then why is the world in the mess it is in?

Read more here.

It’s not their real names. The tiger’s name is Vallejo Akaasha which is Californian for Tony. The dolphin’s name is Maverick which is Californian for Flipper.

The two characters met at Six Flags Discovery Kingdom in Vallejo, California.

Flipper spoke to Tiger – see the bubbles?

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