A nugget of amber from Myanmar has been found with a nearly complete baby bird inside. The specimen is one of the several recently discovered amber nuggets with entombed body parts of feathered dinosaurs.
Paleontologists Lida Xing and colleagues announced the discovery of one of the most amazing fossil specimens yet known: a baby bird preserved in a nugget of amber. The amber specimen, about the size of half of an avocado, allows details of the bird’s anatomy to be seen in extraordinary detail and in three dimensions, something no other fossil specimen have shown.
Rocks deposited in the middle portion of the Cretaceous Period from Myanmar (formerly called Burma) are famous for their numerous large amber specimens. This amber is important for the gem and jewelry industry, and many scientifically important amber specimens have been discovered in amber markets. Amber is formed when tree sap is buried in sediment. Over millions of years, the sap hardens and can frequently contain parts of plants and insects. On rare occasions, amber can preserve portions of larger animals, as in this case.
I’ve been telling everyone I know for YEARS not to buy Blue Buffalo.
This is the short story:
A few years ago I took my sick cat, Ankh, to the vet. The vet and vet tech asked what I fed her. I told them Blue Buffalo. They looked like I had just told them I fed her razor blades and cyanide. They diagnosed her with pancreatitis and said that nearly all of the cats they’d been seeing lately with pancreatitis were being fed Blue Buffalo. They gave her medicine and sent her home. Two days later she had a seizure and died right in my arms.
The day after she died Hannibal started displaying the same symptoms she had so I panicked hard and took him to the vet. Got the same meds and the same diagnosis. Luckily Hannibal survived.
I wish Ankh had survived. She was only ten and the best cat I’ve ever had. Literally the best and five years later I still cry when I think about her.
FUCK BLUE BUFFALO.
I don’t know the full story behind the tweets above, but a Google search shows there HAVE been several recalls regarding this brand, especially in 2016. I would absolutely avoid as it is not worth the risk.
Good god thank you so much for sharing this because I’ve lately been considering switching to this brand cus it’s supposed to be so much better than all the others but good god what the hell.
I worked in a vet for a little while and I shit you not, when a dog came in with constant diarrhea they were always eating Blue Buffalo. We changed the food and the dog got better every time. Blue Buffalo is garbage food and never feed it to your pets.
I’ve never heard of this brand but I love my dog with all of my heart and I’d be broken if I ever accidently fed her this and got her sick (people give me different dog food to try all the time). I’d hate for anyone else to lose their pet also.
um?? what the fuck? holy FUCK my boyfriend and I were just about to start feeding our cat blue buffalo omg
Wft really?? Im never going to buy that killer food!! Praying for your pets!
I’m so glad I know this, I’d be heartbroken if my dog died
If the situation comes up again, this sounds gruesome, but take a brick, place the bird’s head on a flat surface, and crush the skull as quickly as possible. No intact brain means it’s a painless death. Works on all animals small enough to crush the skull like that.
Just picked up this fascinating snub-nosed, scissor-toothed juvenile r.abbit skull! It’s pictured next to a normal skull from an animal around the same size and age.
These skulls came from meat r.abbits that were culled. Both are missing some pieces and parts but that deformed skull is still pretty amazing! I thought the teeth were in the wrong root holes at first but that’s just how they grew naturally—normal-sized teeth in too short of a snout!
Silvery coho salmon are as much a part of Washington state as its flag. The fish has a sacred place
in the diets and rituals of the state’s indigenous peoples, beckons to
tourists who flock to watch its migration runs, and helps to sustain a
multimillion-dollar Pacific Northwest fishing industry.
So
watching the species die in agony is distressing: Adult coho have been
seen thrashing in shallow fresh waters, males appear disoriented as they
swim, and females are often rolled on their backs, their insides
still plump with tiny red eggs that will never hatch.
“Coho
have not done well where a lot of human activity impacts their
habitat,” said Nat Scholz, a research zoologist for the National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration. That’s to say the least.
A recent study traced
a major coho salmon die-off to contaminants from roads and automobiles —
brake dust, oil, fuel, chemical fluids — that hitch a ride on storm
water and flow into watersheds. The contaminants are so deadly, they
kill the salmon within 24 hours…
They failed to understand breed traits of the dog before they got it (y’know, since it was an impulse buy) and when you have a family with 6 kids and have strangers often over at the house due to that, having a dog that’s bred to be wary of and sometimes aggressive toward strangers is a FUNDAMENTALLY SHITTY IDEA.
Their dog even considered us strangers, even though she saw us every day, because we didn’t live in the house with them and would react with extreme aggression whenever she could see us out in our yard (which she considered ‘too close’ to her territory).
She reacted the same way to our dogs.
They have a 5′ fence, which she could easily clear, and did on multiple occasions, to chase people walking by–by chase, I mean she would have seriously injured them if she’d caught them, because everything she could see was ‘her territory’ and anyone even walking by their house was too close.
This was WITH professional training and extensive socialization. They at least knew they had to do that much because they have another large breed dog.
By the time she was a full sized adult, she was straight up a dangerous dog to have, especially since she could clear their fence, so they started tying her in the back yard when she had to go out instead of leaving her loose. She’d still bark excessively at anyone she could see and would try her hardest to bust the chain to get at anyone she could see walking past the house.
We started actually being afraid to be outside, not knowing when they were going to let her out, because she was so aggressively defensive and had charged at us in the past.
She also barked ALL THE TIME, because that’s what Tibetan Mastiffs do: Their primary ‘job’ in guarding their territory and flock is to bark until your ass comes out there to drive the threat off or the threat leaves on its own. Problem is, in a busy suburb, there’s always a ‘threat’ nearby in the dog’s mind, so she barked. Constantly. She even barked near constantly in the house. They tried a bark collar, but she just straight up didn’t give a shit (bonus: they’re also a stubborn breed and a breed with exceptionally high pain tolerance) and kept barking anyway.
They asked us what to do about a month ago after the first time she got out, attacked someone’s on leash dog, AND bit the owner of that dog (who said they didn’t want to press charges because the bite wound didn’t require stitches) because our dogs are well behaved and I was just, “You never should have bought that dog in the first place; that’s a dog that’s bred to be aggressively defensive about strange anything coming anywhere near its ‘territory’, which is anything even remotely close to your house. There isn’t anything you can do here, that dog is going to severely injure or kill someone or their dog at some point or injure or kill one of you or your kids or their friends in the process if you try to stop it.”
“…oh.”
“Seriously, read up on that breed a bit then tell me if you still feel confident you can safely keep her.”
She was gone 3 days after that conversation; they had her put down because, at this point, she wasn’t safe to really have anyone keep and had a bite history which made her a legal liability for anyone to keep (and would open them up to being sued if they failed to disclose the bite and behavior history and the dog ended up biting or killing someone or something else).
Our neighbor mentioned that, even on the way there, she nearly got away to lunge and chase after someone walking by or to go after people in the parking lot at the vet. It took them, the vet, and three assistants to get a muzzle on her and two of the assistants were bitten in the process.
This was not a ‘vicious’ dog, however, and her behavior–despite how it escalated–wasn’t atypical for the breed.
It was probably made a little worse as they didn’t know how to properly teach her the boundaries of their property or effectively curb her high guardian drive (which means she never should have been a ‘city dog’ in the first place). Some blame also lies with the breeder who was breeding and selling high drive working dogs for selling a high drive working dog to people who were looking for a laid back, large breed family dog.
Either way, because they impulse bought a ‘cute fuzzy’ dog, they ended up with a liability nightmare and the dog ended up dying because of it.
TL;DR: Don’t get a breed of dog because it’s “so fluffy!” or “so cute” or “looks like an adorable fuzzball”, actually research the traits of the breed of dog it is or is mixed with to make sure you can actually handle the animal properly and, if you can’t, stick to just looking at pictures instead.
These are Tibetan Mastiffs. The first photo is a dog that looks more like the AKC standard, whereas the bottom one appears to be more country-of-origin dog. They’re the huge fluffy animals that tumblr falls in love with (and yes, they’re the dog breed that being passed off in a Chinese zoo as a lion). They’re gorgeous animals, but they are not easy or good matches for ‘pet’ homes – @calleo‘s story is a prime example of why it’s so important to really research the breed of dog you’re getting before you commit.
I never understood people who counter the “keep your cat inside” notion with “but what about barn cats?”
Yeah? What about them? Barn cats die horribly every day. They die buried alive in grain bins, full of parasites, crushed to death by farm equipment, you name it. They aren’t considered pets. They’re at best working animals who exist as pest control, and at worst barely tolerated ferals that receive no vetting or help simply because it’s impossible to approach them.
You don’t want your pet cat to be a barn cat. Why do you think a barn cat has a soft, easy life? Even the best kept farm cats I’ve ever met had some kind of scar and they almost always have fleas. The last farm I went to had both pet cats and “barn” cats, but they never let the pet cats free roam- because they liked those cats and actually wanted them to come back alive. The barn cats got food, and that was it, because they were untouchable.
Leaving your housecat outside and trying to wave it away as “the same as a barn cat” is like leaving your cocker spaniel to free roam because he’s “the same as a livestock guardian dog.” Unless your only solution to a huge rat problem is laying down impressive amounts of dangerous poison, you have no business leaving your cat to roam.
BettSplendens Tumblr Evac 