Good Bye Yellowstone!

Well shoot! Today started off cloudy and rainy, but now it seems to be clearing up. A little too late to go on my walk and now I have other things on my mind. Anna is coming back home from Yellowstone. After all the trouble we went through to get her to the position she's at now. She was doing so much better after getting that one supervisor fired. Now she has to come home. I know it's no fault of her own, she's not adjusting to the 10,000-ft. high altitude there. Well, I am happy she at least got to see Old Faithful. She informed me that she has been there a month, and has only made $300. Not hardly worth it staying there. But I knew she wasn't going to make that much, she has to pay for her dorm room and meals and stuff, they take all that out of her pay! And she doesn't work every day. We knew all that though before she even left for there. Now she says she has a doctor bill there too for $75. It's NOT worth staying there!!!! She could have made more money staying here at home and working at one of the hotels down here on the strip. And I wouldn't have to keep sending her money from home and DVDs and other things and she would never have gotten sick. Well, at least she had a taste of being out on her own, and living it up in Yellowstone National Park. And I had a taste of being on my own too. Sometimes it has been fun. Sometimes it has been somewhat lonely. But there are some things I enjoyed doing while I was here by myself that I will have to re-un-adjust (if there is such a word) to when Anna gets back. For one thing, kitchen duties every night. I did them like once every week since she's been gone. Now I will have to get used to doing them every night again. It kinda sucks, but it's nothing I cannot handle.

Last night I was watching something about tyrannosaurs. For several years now I've been hearing Jack Horner, one of the leading authorities on Palaeontology, saying that tyrannosaurus rex was actually a cowardly scavenger. It's obvious T. rex was a meat-eater, but Horner thinks they were scavengers, not actual hunt-and-killum predators. Personally, I think he's wrong! T. rex was maybe a part-time scavenger, but I whole-heartedly doubt they were full-time scavengers. In today's world, no mammalian meat-eaters are full time hunters or scavengers, with the exception of maybe 2 species. Those are African wild dogs and cheetahs, both species built for running. They never scavenge, they only eat prey that they themselves capture. But look at lions and hyenas, and they will sometimes scavenge and sometimes kill their own food. It's about a 50-50 split with them. That is what I believe T. rex was like. There is so much more to prove this. Although one of the biggest arguments I have heard is that T. rex's arms were so tiny they could not have been able to grasp the prey they were taking down. Well, I believe that is why their head and jaws were so big. They needed them to be able to hold on to struggling prey. However we will never really know unless someone clones an actual Tyrannosaur. But do we really want to do that??

What do you think of that? Sure it would be nice to see a live dinosaur. But how would we know how one will respond to us? Or how will we know how to respond to them? Ever seen the movie Carnosaur? I picture it being similar to that. Besides that I think it would be disrespectful to nature. Nature selected dinosaurs to go extinct. Extinction is a natural process of elimination, akin to us cleaning out our closets and throwing things away that we don't need anymore. While I will admit today many animals are going extinct because of human encroachment, some animals are being eliminated naturally through selection even today right under our noses. Look at cheetahs, the felines built for running. They are dying off because of a low sperm count, it has nothing to do with the invasion of humans into their habitat at all. Nature is obviously trying to naturally eliminate cheetahs. Probably to make way for some new species to take it's place. Now, if humans were not here to intervene, cheetahs would have died off a long time ago and by now we'd see some new species beginning to emerge gradually to take it's place. Maybe lions would develop sleeker bodies, or maybe African wild dogs would get bigger and faster with better weapons. Who knows? But humans will not allow the natural course of evolution to take place because we insist on saving every last cheetah there is. Nevermind that they have a very low sperm-count and will probably die off in about 50 years anyway.

Now animals that are dying off because we have begun to build on and pollute their natural habitat, or are over-hunting them, that's a different story. Those animals should be saved. A great example are mountain gorillas. Farm lands are pushing into the natural range of the gorillas and replacing their natural food sources with cultivated crops, which mountain gorillas will not touch! One of the reasons it's nearly impossible to keep a mountain gorilla in captivity. Besides that, humans are hunting these rare apes for the sake of trophies. Just recently, I heard of poachers who mauled 6 adult mountain gorillas and cut off their heads and hands! Dian Fossey would turn in her grave if she had seen that!!! I do imagine though she is up in Heaven looking down and is extremely PISSED!!!!!!!

Well, those are just my views. Oh yes! Anyone who loves dinosaurs there will be a story available on my site called "Celina and the Tyrannosaur". It's about a lemur named Celina who finds a tyrannosaur egg and hatches it, and decides to keep the tyrannosaur chick as a pet and names him Rex (of course!) If you have kids, this is a great story!!! It's by a woman named Keisha Simpson, who was in our little "group" in 1993.

OK, enough with the shameless advertising! LOL!