The beautiful nature

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These amazing images capture the moment a puffin was the victim of a mid-air mugging by a greedy gull.

The puffin got a nasty shock when it the raider swooped in to snatch a haul of sand eels from its beak.

The smaller seabird, which would have had to work hard for its beakful of fish, was taken totally by surprise during the airborne smash-and-grab.

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        A HUGE bull called The Field Marshall has reaffirmed his title as Britain’s biggest bullock after piling on the beef.

The eight-year-old Charolais tipped the scales at 3,682lb (1,670kg) – a staggering 300lb more than he weighed one year ago.

He took part in a charity "guess the weight" contest, where organisers had to use specialist scales used to weigh lorries to calculate his mass.

The Field Marshall has overtaken the previous record holder, his former stablemate The Colonel, who stood 6ft 5in tall and weighed 3,500lb before his death in 2005.

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It’s a tough time to be a spectacled bear at the zoo in Leipzig, Germany — at least, it’s a tough time to be a female spectacled bear.  Veterinarians are struggling to determine why the zoo’s female spectacled bears have suddenly lost nearly all their fur, which is typically shaggy for both females and males of their species.  There has been speculation that a genetic defect could be responsible, but beyond the obvious hair loss and its accompanying itchiness, no other symptoms have been noted in the affected bears.

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The fossil history of the Gavialoidea is quite well known, with the earliest examples diverging from the other crocodilians in the late Cretaceous. The most distinctive feature of the group is the very long, narrow snout, which is an adaptation to a diet of small fish. Although gharials have sacrificed the great mechanical strength of the robust skull and jaw that most crocodiles and alligators have, and in consequence cannot prey on large creatures, the reduced weight and water resistance of their lighter skull and very narrow jaw gives gharials the ability to catch rapidly moving fish, using a side-to-side snapping motion.

The earliest gharial may have been related to the modern types: some died out at the same time as the dinosaurs (at the end of the Cretaceous), others survived until the early Eocene. The modern forms appeared at much the same time, evolving in the estuaries and coastal waters of Africa, but crossing the Atlantic to reach South America as well. At their peak, the Gavialoidea were numerous and diverse, they occupied much of Asia and America up until the Pliocene. One species, Rhamphosuchus crassidens of India, is believed to have grown to an enormous 15 metres (~50 feet) or more.

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