Hysteria grips state as giant turkeys cause Christmas nightmare By Sally Glaetzer | The Mercury | December 24, 2009 10:27AM TASMANIAN butchers say they are facing the nightmare of irate customers and financial losses thanks to over-sized turkeys The state’s turkey supplier Nichols says its Christmas birds are up to 2kg heavier than expected this year thanks mostly to a cooler growing season, according to a report in The Mercury. Home cooks who ordered a 3kg turkey for Christmas Day are likely to find themselves battling to get a bird that will fit in the oven. “It’s a nightmare,” Shane Mundy of Hill Street Gourmet Meats said. Customers were furious and many had cancelled entire orders of up to $500, including hams and barbecue meats. “We’ve had cancelled orders and it means more turkeys that we’re going to have to freeze or make sausages with, so we lose money,” Mr Mundy said yesterday. “It’s caused mass panic and hysteria. People don’t know what they’re going to do. “I had to sit down for five hours the other night to change all the orders … all the butchers will be having the same problems,” he said. He said butchers had no choice but to meet the one-day-of-the-year demand for turkeys. “It’s traditional, people want the turkey coming out of the oven on Christmas Day,” Mr Mundy said. That meant he and his staff would work all through the night on Wednesday boning and rolling turkeys. Nichols owner Robert Nichols “felt dreadful” about the fiasco, but said his company would also lose out. “We’ve probably got some birds that literally won’t fit in the oven,” he said He said the company was forced to sell a more premium boned and rolled product to butchers for the price of a regular turkey.
From Salty Seattle “A week after I’d placed my order at the macelleria for the turkey, I went to pick it up. The macelliao told me this was on the small side, but it was so big I could hardly carry it and I was thankful I had brought a rolling handcart with which to wheel it down bustling Corso di Gasperi to my flat. Once home, my husband and I weighed Marinella the turkey. She came in at 18 kilos- that’s about 40 pounds.”
Giant Turkey-Like Dinosaur Found in Utah
for National Geographic News
Fossil hunters in Utah have uncovered a new species of birdlike, meat- eating dinosaur that researchers compare to a giant, flightless turkey.
Having lived some 75 million years ago, the two-legged dinosaur was twice the size of related species found in Canada and the northern United States, say fossil experts at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.
The find shows that a group of dinosaurs called oviraptors roamed much farther south than previously thought, they add.
Oviraptors had simple feathers, winglike arms, powerful legs, long claws, and powerful, toothless beaks for shearing through food.
Researchers made the find in a remote, mountainous region in the southwestern U.S. that’s fast gaining a reputation as an untapped “dinosaur graveyard” full of unusual species.
Only fragments of the animal were discovered—a fearsomely clawed hand and foot. But the dinosaur probably stood seven feet (two meters) tall and ran as fast as an ostrich, according to paleontologists Lindsay Zanno and Scott Sampson.
Named Hagryphus giganteus (“giant four-footed, birdlike god of the western desert”), the new species is described in the current issue of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.
