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Comment by vibrio | Hacker News Reader

I can’t wait until Thanksgiving.

As God as my witness, I thought turkeys could fly.

like wet sacks of cement...

I always wondered if there was a relationship between this and the Oregon exploding whale in 1970 ? https://www.google.com/search?q=whale+explosion+oregon

Evidently it's from a true story. Luckily not actually thrown from a helicopter!

https://classictvhistory.wordpress.com/2012/11/21/turkeys-aw...

CLARKE BROWN: The turkey drop was actually a real incident. ... Although the turkeys were thrown off the back of a truck, as opposed to how it was depicted on the [show].

They can, but they don't gain altitude so good. I had one fly across the road at top-of-windshield level. Since I figured it would just clear or just glance off, I did nothing to avoid it.

Unfortunately, I had a roof rack on. Fortunately, I was able to find replacement parts for the rack on eBay.

The turkey didn't appear to be harmed. After tumbling ass over teakettle to the ground, it walked into the field on the side of the road looking for all the world like a cat that wanted you to forget you'd just seen it do something beneath its dignity.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=lf3mgmEdfwg

Clearer, upscaled version - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lr1cJdH6ffg

Turkeys are one of the animals in that general category that, knowing what we know now, you look at them and you're like "How could smart scientists not look at them and not see that they are obviously a form of dinosaur?"

Even their footprints look like a dinosaur track

It's almost worse that, if you go back a ways, a lot of the theories were that extinction was fairly incremental--even comet/meteor notwithstanding. So, given essentially total extinction, convergent evolution may not have been a bad theory and may not even have been totally wrong.

The idea that birds are descended from dinosaurs is nearly as old as evolution itself, first being proposed by Thomas Huxley in 1868 (Origin of the Species dates from 1859).

The only reason there was a competing evolutionary theory is because it was erroneously thought that birds have a clavicle and dinosaurs don't, so instead it was proposed that birds and dinosaurs have a common ancestor, and that dinosaurs lost the clavicle. Now that they have excavated many more bones paleontologists have since discovered therapod clavicles.

But now we know birds didn't descend from dinosaurs. They are dinosaurs. The ones that lived.

We don't "know" that, because that's not a category of thing we can know or not know. It's a matter of semantics of whether we consider birds dinosaurs, just like it's a matter of semantics of whether we consider people a kind of fish.

"Know" in science is used informally to mean "the preponderance of evidence supports this conclusion. Which could turn out to be wrong if enough contrary evidence is later found."

The scientific consensus today is that the evidence supports the idea that not all the dinosaurs died out when the Chicxulub comet struck 66 million years ago. The ones that could fly or quickly learn how to fly survived and even thrived, and their grandkids are in your back yard right now.

https://www.birdlife.org/news/2021/12/21/its-official-birds-...

You're not understanding my point. The scientific evidence is that birds are descended from dinosaurs. Scientific evidence can't make birds be dinosaurs, because it's up to us to define "bird" and "dinosaur", and we can define "bird" to exclude dinosaur (and I think most people still do). Just like we can define "fish" and "human", and we can define "fish" to exclude human, even though some fish learned how to walk on land and one of their grandkids is typing this comment right now. Biologists might wish that we all adopt cladistic definitions for types of organisms, but that doesn't the world will follow.

The absolute favorite activity of my dog is to chase groups of turkeys that are in our yard. She’s only 15 pounds (and 15 years old now) and has never caught one, but I think being in the middle of a group of 20 turkeys all desperately trying to fly up to trees quickly is quite the experience for her.

She’s never caught one, even the younger ones. It seems like they can actually fly easier than the adults.

I walked out one morning and had a whole flock of them on the pergola on our second story deck. I was pretty surprised that they managed to get up there, three stories off the ground.

At the same time, they dont seem to be able to fly well when they panic. I let my dogs out one morning not knowing there was a turkey in their fenced area. The turkey freaked out and flew straight into the fence. Never seen a dog move as fast as my 70lb chow/cattle dog mix moved that morning.

And, yes, he destroyed that turkey.

I am guessing you live in a place where turkeys were introduced as game birds (such as California). Because in their native range turkeys are wary of humans and other preditors. That’s why turkey hunting involves calls and camouflage and patience…

Loved WKRP in Cincinnati. Always looked forward to the hog report. Not only can turkeys fly they bounce, too. A lot of unknowns, at the time, made appearances on that show before becoming famous themselves.

I was thinking of this episode the other day and wondering how it could have stuck with all of us independently after all these years given that there was no social media / meme sharing back then.

There were plenty of reruns. Not as much content back then as we have now.

Oh thank you, I came here to make that joke. Great show.

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