While I was working on accounts today in the office, David brought me an assistant.
This tiny, but extremely active, little chap is a baby snapping turtle. Brian found him in the grass. After his visit in the office to check up on the math, he (or she?) was lovingly taken down to the pond where there is lots of food but not lots of predators for little turtles.
After all, this is a Time Machine. A member of a species that considered T-Rex to be a flash in the pan. Snapping turtles should be treated with great reverence, since there are very few creatures still around that can trace their ancestry back 215 million years. (Just try it -- get on one of those geneology websites and just see how far back you get!)
They can live for 75 years or longer, so we hope this little fellow enjoys a long and happy life in the Lake of Bays. We don't know if it was a boy or a girl -- that would have been determined by where the egg was in the nest, and how warm it was. The sex of these turtles is determined by temperature (chicks are hot, dudes are cool). We hope global warming doesn't toss a spanner into that.
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