Walkabout

I'm always amazed at the depth of information paleontologists can glean from fossils.

And I'm not even including the ones that show exceptional preservation, like the ichthyosaur fossils I mentioned in a post a couple of days ago, that were so well preserved that they could even determine features like countershading.  Ordinary fossils contain a wealth of information about the organisms they came from -- if you know where to look, and how to interpret it.

Take, for example, the paper by a team from the University of Bristol and the University of Uppsala that appeared last week in the journal Alcheringa: An Australasian Journal of Paleontology.  Conducted by Christine Janis, Adrian O'Driscoll, and Benjamin Kear, the study analyzed the bones of prehistoric kangaroos, and reached a rather startling conclusion: a good many ancient kangaroo species didn't have the group's signature hop.

The determination came from looking at the strength and articulation of the leg bones, as well as the animal's overall size.  In particular, the short-faced kangaroos, or sthenurines, may have preferred to walk on all fours -- or might even have had a bipedal stride like a human.

The skeleton of Simosthenurus occidentalis, which I find vaguely terrifying. [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Ghedoghedo, Simosthenurus occidentalis, CC BY-SA 3.0]

You can see why they're called short-faced kangaroos in the artist's recreation of Procoptodon goliah below, in which I notice two things:

1. These creatures looked like a cross between a bunny rabbit and Godzilla.
2. The woman posing next to it has a stance like a Glamour magazine model, which is an odd thing to do if you're confronted with an eight-foot-tall kangaroo with giant claws.  Me, I'd be running like hell, if I didn't just wet my pants and then faint.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Nobu Tamura, Procoptodon goliah NT, CC BY-SA 4.0]

The striding kangaroos seem to have split off from the hopping kind about fifteen million years ago, during the Miocene Epoch, when Australia was a lot wetter than it currently is.  The climate back then would have favored large herbivores like the sthenurines (thank heaven these things weren't carnivorous), and they simply became too heavy to jump efficiently.  Even smaller sthenurines, though, had a different leg articulation -- they all appear to have been walkers rather than hoppers.

The last of the striding kangaroos went extinct during the last Ice Age, when the climate took a turn toward more arid conditions.  Aridity meant fewer plants, and slower growth for the ones that survived, and the largest marsupials in Australia died out.

Just as well.  Even the kangaroos that are left can kick you into the middle of next week; every year people, mostly stupid tourists, are injured by kangaroos.  Australians also have to contend with the various venomous snakes, spiders, and jellyfish, a relative of the nettle (the gympie-gympie) whose spines inject a neurotoxin that causes intense pain for years, and a highly-aggressive bird called the cassowary that looks like the bastard child of a turkey and a velociraptor.  The last thing those poor people need is giant kangaroo-bunnies striding around like they own the place.

Because the kangaroo-bunnies probably were vicious.  Down there, it's kind of an inevitability.

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Virile as the mighty... kangaroo?

New from the "What The Hell Are They Thinking?" department, today I found out that the Chinese are marketing a new "alternative medicine" treatment for impotence: a supplement made from powdered kangaroo balls.

I wish I was making this up.  Here's an advertisement for the product:

Well, I'm convinced.  That guy has a bottle of "Essence of Red Kangaroo K-max 3000" pills the size of a garbage can, and he is clearly about to get laid.  Or possibly, because judicious photo cropping leaves us unable to be certain, he may already be in the process.  What more evidence do we need?

None, apparently, because John Kreuger, owner of a company that processes kangaroo meat, is now sending over a ton of testicles to China every month.  In fact, he said that in order to separate the testicles from the scrotum, he has had to build a special custom "de-nutting machine," a phrase that I have a hard time imagining any male uttering without immediately going into a protective crouch.

Be that as it may, the dehydrated and powdered roo balls are then put into capsule form in Chinese traditional medicine manufacturing plants, and can fetch $165 for a bottle of 300 once it reaches the market.  The selling point, apparently, is that male kangaroos have been observed to mate with as many as forty females, and "the capability to produce the spermatic fluid of the male kangaroo is twice that of the adult bull," which is a direct quote from the advertisements for the capsules.

I really hoped that the days of sympathetic magic were over -- the ancient idea that two things being similar means that one can be used in place of the other.  It's the origin of the myth that walnuts are good for the brain (they kind of look alike) and that beets "strengthen the blood" (both are red).  Traditional Chinese medicine is rife with these ideas, where both rhinoceros horn and dried tiger penises are consumed as aphrodisiacs.  But given that tigers and rhinos are now both seriously endangered species -- in part, due to the lucrative nature of the use of their parts for this kind of nonsense -- desperately horny Chinese men have had to turn to a more readily accessible source of completely useless supplements.

I guess that if you really do buy into this, though, it's better to go after kangaroos than tigers.  Kangaroos are common, to the point that a good many Australians consider them pests, and they're raised commercially for meat.  May as well use the testicles for something, I guess.

The downside, though, is that people like Kreuger are turning a quick buck based upon the gullibility of people with more money than sense, and perpetuating an irrational belief in the process.  Because, after all, the placebo effect is a powerful thing -- a guy who took his powdered roo ball pill and thinks he's going to have a really good erection is more likely to be, um, successful than a guy who is worried because he ran out of pills, and now is pretty sure he won't.

So on the whole, it's absurd, and kind of annoying that people in this day and age are still falling for this stuff.  But the same might be said for most woo-woo beliefs, even those that are more pleasant to talk about because they do not involve the phrase "de-nutting machine."