Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site qubix.UUCP
Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!harpo!decvax!decwrl!sun!qubix!jdb
From: jdb@qubix.UUCP (Jeff Bulf)
Newsgroups: net.flame
Subject: Re: Shasta Sloths *eat* wombats
Message-ID: <813@qubix.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 3-Feb-84 16:08:51 EST
Article-I.D.: qubix.813
Posted: Fri Feb  3 16:08:51 1984
Date-Received: Wed, 8-Feb-84 07:36:05 EST
References: <552@seismo.UUCP> <584@sbcs.UUCP>
Organization: Qubix Graphic Systems, Saratoga, CA
Lines: 62

[do gremlins still eat lines?]

    The following article is from the San Jose Mercury, Feb. 16, 1977.
(quoted without permission). I'd write a lot more articles and memos if they
could all be as much fun.

================================ start of quote ==============================

SHASTA SLOTH'S BLAZING LEGACY

[washington post service]

WASHINGTON -- For the last seven months the National Park Service has been 
trying to put out a fire in a 25,000-year accumulation of giant Shasta sloth
dung in a remote Grand Canyon Cave.

    So far, the agency has not succeeded, and the effort has cost $50,000.

    The prehistoric pile, apparently ignited by hikers and discovered ablaze
July 14, has been a treasure trove for paleobiologists and botanists since 
Rampart Cave and its contnts were discovered in the 1930s.

    The arid Arizona climate had preserved intact the dung and other remains
of the Shasta sloth, which became extinct 12,000 years ago; of an extinct 
species of mountain goat, and of other fauna that flourished in the South-
west between 35,000 and 8,000 BC.

    Last sumer the park service and Interior Department mine saftey officials
journeyed to the cave by boat and helicopter, pumped it full of carbon
monoxide and dioxide gases, and sealed it, hoping the fire would die out.

    When the cave was reopened late last month and found full of smoke, the 
dung smoldering like a bog or peat fire, frustrated government officials began
considering other expensive alternatives.

    Interior officials will meet Friday with University of Arizona professors,
who have been digging in the dung for more than a decade, to discuss filling the
cave with fire-fighting foam or hiring crews to shovel out the burning dung and
shore up the cave's roof, which has been weakened by the fire.

    Smithsonian Institution paleobiology curator Dr. Clayton Ray Tuesday 
called the cave and its endangered feces a "unique stratified storehouse"
of information. The Smithsonian's Museum of Natural History, which has a 
collection of Shasta sloth bones and dung, though not on display, conducted an 
expidition at the cave in 1940.

    Ray said the Shasta sloth -- which he does not like to call a giant sloth
"because he was only about the size of a black bear, nothing huge" -- was not
very notable except for producing a large and durable stool in the same place
for about 25,000 years.

===================== end of quoted article =================================

So NO MORE GIBBERISH ABOUT WOMBATS unless the do something in the league with
the serious sh*t going down from the Shast Sloths.


			giving the straight poop

-- 
	Dr Memory
	...{decvax,ucbvax,ihnp4}!decwrl!qubix!jdb