Dark Banquet - Bill Schutt [107]
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*14 A recent study suggests that Desmodus uses passive hearing to identify the breathing patterns of animals that have been fed upon previously. This may help explain how vampires can return to the same animal over consecutive nights.
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†15 In 1967 a man fired a shotgun into a cluster of bats in an abandoned railway tunnel west of Comstock, Texas (and about five miles from the Mexican border). One of the dead bats was determined to be Diphylla ecaudata. Over forty years later, this remains the only modern record of a noncaptive vampire bat in the United States.
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*16 One wonders just how she got around the problem of blood coagulation.
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†17 In Victorian England, people consumed blood at slaughterhouses, convinced that by doing so they could prevent tuberculosis, a deadly bacterial infection, once referred to as “consumption” (not because of blood-drinking but because it seemed to consume people from within).
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*18 A boy by the name of Ernest Wicks was found, apparently dead, in 1895, and after being laid out at a Regent’s Park mortuary, he suddenly returned to life. An investigation later revealed that the child had “died” four times and that “the mother has obtained no less than three medical certificates of death, any one of which would have been sufficient for the subject to have been buried.” As we’ll see later, George Washington’s final request was that he not be entombed for three days after being pronounced dead—presumably for fear of being interred alive.
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*19 This group of selected nobles (friends and political allies of the Holy Roman Emperor) had been commissioned in 1408.
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*20 Ungulates are hoofed mammals. Artiodactyls are ungulates (like cows, camels, giraffes, and pigs), so-named because they have an even number of toes (i.e., two or four).
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†21 Silica is also a primary component of glass (which is also rather indigestible).
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*22 The modern horse runs on the tips of its third (or middle) digit.
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*23 Dr. MacPhee was troubled by the fact that these well-established and often formidable mammals could be wiped out in a geologic instant by Paleo-Indians wielding pointed sticks. “Why haven’t similarly equipped Bushmen driven any large African mammals to extinction?” MacPhee asked during a symposium on Pleistocene extinctions, before offering an alternative hypothesis. “What if humans or the domestic animals they brought with them to this continent were carrying something that the American mammals’ immune system couldn’t handle?”
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*24 Although creation scientists pass themselves off as real scientists, when pressed (usually when sworn under oath) they invariably admit that they’re not. In order to join their organizations (e.g., The Institute for Creation Research), they must take a vow that what is written in the Bible is the only truth, scientific or otherwise. But hey, if you believe that the earth is six thousand years old, you shouldn’t believe in evolution either.
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*25 A. R. E. Lewis told Fenton that approximately 10 percent of the African buffalo (Syncercus caffer) he studied in Tanzania had scars from unsuccessful lion attacks.
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*26 These bats belong to the family Pteropodidae and are commonly known as flying foxes.
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*27 Briefly, whereas Diaemus has fairly robust hind limb bones