It is your fault. Your tiny writing ruined my vision.
Now I need reading glasses when I go on fossil hunts.
But reading glasses makes the ground appear one foot
closer than it actually is so I bruised my heel. Big
deal, but this caused me to walk crooked so I twisted
my knee which was a big deal because I limped around
on crutches for a week until I could walk again with a
brace. Thanks a lot.

So remembering well my ordeal I opted not to go with
Andy and the gang to Cavanaugh Cave but went for a
walk around the countryside instead.

After two hours of tramping about I tired of tramping and remembered the bottle of delicious blueberry wine in the cooler in the Cherokee and cut across a big plowed-under cornfield to get to the wine and wait for the cave folk to return.

As I walked across the dark red furrows I looked down in search of arrow and spear points, but except for an occasional field rock all I saw were white chicken bones. They were everywhere. Strange. But then I figured it out, I think. The bones had been scattered to enrich the soil, apparently the soil needed calcium. Yeah, good thinking Milo, yeah...calcium.

About midway though the field I saw a big black rock in a furrow across the way and I limped over to it. My luck continued, the big black object turned out to be a cow patty.
I limped on faster.

Ah, camp life is good. To hell with good wine; drinking Andy’s imported beer while he crawled around in a cave was even better. I sat back in a canvas chair and thought about chicken bones...
Hmm...the closest Tyson plant was forty miles away...besides, the Tyson people crushed their bones into a powder...maybe they... Drat! My beer bottle was empty. Then I heard a voice in my head say...”Cows don’t drink beer”. Startled, I jumped up and answered the voice in my head, saying loudly, “And they don’t eat chicken either!”

Rushing to the Cherokee I grabbed Andy’s camera and a six-pack of Andy’s beer and limped madly back towards the big pile of black dung. I was right. This was no cow patty. Within the disc shaped ten by four inch thick matrix of black dung could be seen a scatter of the clean white crushed bones of birds. This dung was the dung of a giant carnivore.

What was it that left these droppings? I don’t know. There are no giant cats or grizzly bears in Alabama and I am at a loss to explain the dung. I took several photographs using a shiny new penny as scale.

And since ataoin is boycotting Awad or something, if you are interested, you can contact Andy at <azerbe@hiwaay.net> and he will email you the pictures of the mysterious dung.