Giant GOOSE??? We have geese around here !

“Yes, another oddball story for ya. Just call me Paulette Harvey. "Good Day!"

SYDNEY, Australia, Aug. 16 — Monster kangaroos, car-sized wombats and flesh-eating marsupials were not the only outsized megafauna thundering across Australia before man’s arrival.

Australian researchers say they have pieced together fossils of a giant goose that could have weighed up to half a ton and may have thrived as long as 55 million years ago.

“WE’VE BEEN SLOWLY sort of putting them together over the years,” paleontologist Peter Murray of the Museum of Central Australia in Alice Springs said Thursday.

“It’s a very large bird, extraordinary in terms of just unexpectedly large kinds of birds. It’s very clear that they’re geese,” Murray told Reuters.

Today’s Magpie goose and the South American Screamer are possibly the closest relatives of the hulking flightless birds, he said.

Palaeontologists remain divided as to whether the giant geese were herbivores or whether they hunted and ate meat.

The fossils found by the Museum of Central Australia researchers in the outback of the Northern Territory are thought to be 8 million years old. Like other megafauna, it is believed they died out around 50,000 years ago.

Although flightless, Murray said he did not think the geese would have been an easy prey for predators looking for the Eocene equivalent of their Christmas dinner.

Some of the eight species of megageese identified so far appear to have been extremely fast runners and look like large ostriches, or emus. For others, their sheer size might have done the trick.

“No problems, they’d kick them into orbit,” Murray said. “And they would have behaved like geese, which ... you know are quite aggressive. Definitely, if we had seen them, it would have been wise to steer clear.”

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“Wow. Can you just imagine the size of the oven you'd need to cook that sucker?
South American screamer, eh? I think I dated her for a while.”

“So uh, lizs, did you get prior written permission from Reuters to redistribute this article? No?
LIZS IS GOIN' TA JAAAAILLL!”

“The Giant Geese in Australia were actually ancient aliens who have manipulated the course of human evolution since before we were walking on two legs. Many of the geese we see today are actually aliens in disguise. Evidence? Check this out:

Who killed Fabio?
One of the more horrifying/hilarious images to come across newswires last week was that of Fabio, seemingly invincible romance-novel model, riding a rollercoaster while blood spurted from his schnozz like a ruptured oil well.

The beefcake king was on a promo visit to Busch Gardens, Va., when he went beak-to-beak with an airborne goose, and luckily for him the injury was nothing more than a tiny gash.

Spokespeople are dismissing the incident as a freak accident, but seriously, what are the chances? Don't you find it a little coincidental that the world's greatest himbo just happened to be in the flight path of a kamikaze goose? Could it be the goose was actually a pawn in an elaborate conspiracy to have Fabio knocked off? Here are some theories as to what really happened on that fateful ride. Someone call Oliver Stone...

. The goose was hired by a militant environmentalist group that believes the majority of ozone layer damage is caused by the thousands of litres of hairspray used each day to maintain Fabio's hair.

. The goose was hired by a militant animal rights group that believes the majority of cattle slaughter in America is masterminded by Hollywood doctors seeking to procure animal hormones for injection into Fabio's pectorals.

. The goose was hired by the producers of Spy Hard, who believe Fabio's cameo was directly responsible for that film's box-office failure.

. The goose was hired by the woman Fabio posed with for the cover of Passions of the Realm. She flew into a jealous rage when she saw him posing on the cover of Lovestorm with another woman. --”

“Now THAT's funny,ROTFLMBO!”

“I salute you Father Goose... benevolent patriarch of the ancient and occult order of the guiding geese, watchers over the evolution of human kind.”

“what do ya think father goose?”

“I think they are both Marvin wannabees... which is kinda nice, since the real Marvin has abandoned us.

668 is a little bit funnier... but the Idaho stuff is pretty funny too.”

“marvin, has to be”

“This kind of troll I can take, LOL.”

“Delicious, but a tad fatty.”

“Honk! Honk!”

“Debate emerges about efforts to relocate Canada geese

"The adults are slaughtered and most of the youngsters are shipped out of state before they learn to fly - because geese return to nest in the place they learned to fly.

Iowa officials expect to take 1,500 to 2,000 goslings from Minnesota this year, but they have indicated they may have enough birds they may not need any more geese."

"It's difficult to putt a ball through 100 geese on the green," said Larry Gillette, wildlife manager for the suburban Three Rivers Park District."

"It's a tremendous tourist attraction," he said. "They're fat and they're sassy. And here's a bit of trivia: They poop 22 times a day."”