When ducks ruled the earth...

Now all of you had better stop laughing at my duck, cos one day, it'll evolve into a 10-foot tall beast with a beak big enough to break all your puny little ducks.

In fact, I found after some idle surfing for big dicks ducks that Dromornis stirtoni was the largest bird that ever lived. It stood over 3 metres tall and weighed half a ton. These 'thunderbirds' became extinct as recently as 30,000 years ago and are thought to be allied to the early anatids (namely ducks, geese and swans). Some call them 'demon ducks of doom' but I prefer to see these feathered nutcrackers as birds whose footsteps caused the ground to shiver and quacke. Is anyone up for a screening of "Jurassic Duck?"

Sadly, some modern ducks are likely to join these oversized drakes and the Labrador duck in the cold halls of extinction, no thanks to the blind intervention of men in the southern Pacific, whose avian fauna had thrived for millenia before man and mallard arrived to mow down the moa and Auckland Island merganser.

The demise of some other bird brains, however, to the occamic razor of natural selection would prompt little regret from my duck. As Non Sequitur puts it, the conflict between science and theology can be aptly resolved by "reasoning that if something is too complex to be easily explained, then it must be the result of divine intervention." Notwithstanding the non sequitur of faith having to lean on scientific proof to support its claims (after all, isn't faith a belief accorded to something, regardless of material proof?), why on earth should unfalsifiable teleological assumptions be ranked equal in institutions of learning to theories assembled, refined and validated in the face of the harshest challenges? And more so, when according to one touchbearer of the wedge strategy, astrology qualifies as a scientific theory by his definitions of the latter. What next? Should we then literally consult the stars in our attempts to see the future, even as their passing rays reach our planet to tell of supernovae born in the dim past of uncounted light-years?   

Comments

[monkey]

i think they evolved to become small my dear O_O"
i dont see how u'd ever likely to evolve to be of the gargantan past again

but i bought home two lil ducks for u ;)

[Hai~Ren]

It's a pity the last mihirung died out in the Pleistocene.

By the way, what do you think are the odds of the survivial of the thought-to-be-extinct Pink-headed Duck?

[budak]

Hard to say, given its wide range spanning many inaccessible regions in South Central Asia.... if Ivory-billed woodpeckers can still be found... I wonder if there are any recent sightings of the cotton pygmy goose here...