Spinosaurs ate my brain

["Richard W. Travsky" <rtravsky@uwyo.edu>]

On Sat, 3 Jul 2004, kustom66 wrote:
> On Saturday, July 3, 2004, at 01:06  PM, Amtoine Grant wrote:
> >> David Marjanovic wrote:
> >>
> >>> Had it been a parachuter, it would have had to climb back up the 
> >>> height of
> >>> the entire tree each time it had caught one insect. Less efficient 
> >>> even than
> >>> jumping up from the ground, right?
> >>
> >> I suppose that depends on the rate of success.  Admittedly, no modern 
> >> animal that I know of catches insects by leaping from the ground into 
> >> the air
> 
> Cats do that - they do it to avian dinosaurs, too.

Most likely for play.

One of previous cats had caught three little bats one summer. My current
cat has managed to catch one (and brought it inside, but luckily it
just flopped around on the floor in front of the dryer so I was able to 
scoop it up and take it back out).

Presumably the bats had made the mistake of flying too close to where
the cat(s) was. For the earlier cat I know that he would sit on the cab or
hood of truck in the back yard by the alley where a telephone pole had
a light on it; the light attracted insects which attracted the bats which
attracted the cat.

I never figured out how my current cat caught his bat; thankfully he
hasn't caught another.