The beautiful nature

        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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Alligator Gar
(Atractosteus spatula)
The alligator gar is a much misunderstood sport-fish in America, it being the second largest freshwater fish here. There are very little true things that are in print about these great fish -
they are a very long lived fish, with no natural predators except man.
They grow very fast in the first 1 to 2 years being able to obtain weights up to 20 lbs the first year, after this spurt of growth they slow down and grow all the rest of their life,
with life spans being upwards of 75 years.
They will feed on anything from birds, to fish with anything in between being taken.
They are at the top of the food chain in their environment, and they are also very fast,
hunting type fish, not a lay in wait type of fish.
They have disappeared from a lot of their former habitats, not due to over-fishing,
but mostly due to habitat changes; as in the Arkansas River, which is no longer a slow natural stream, but a river that has seen the lock and dam system arrive, and the gar are no longer able to tolerate the colder waters. The dam building here in Texas, as in Lake Livingston and Sam Rayburn, has helped the gar to multiply, especially in Lake Livingston where they have the Trinity River to migrate up stream during the spring and sinter floods.
On a normal day here in Texas we will see an average of 20 to 100 gar turn in the surface.
The gar obtain 200+ lbs here quite often with numerous fish being taken above 100 lbs weekly.
The maximum size of this giant is probably around 400 lbs -
Kirk’s biggest Alligator Gar weighed 365 lbs and it was 9 ft 6 in long !

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