Y’know the giant eagles that come and rescue Frodo and Sam two or three hours before the end of The Return of the King? (That’s the one were the king gets back.)
Turns out that something like them really exited.
Huge birds!
Ten-foot wingspans!
Were the dominant predator in their ecosystem (as opposed to dogs or wolves or hyenas or lions or tigers or men).
Know where they existed?
New Zealand. (Oh, the irony!)
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Author: Jimmy Akin
Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live."
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Actually you have to wonder if there are any small animals in Middle Earth. Think about it. Giant eagles. Giant spiders. Giant elephants. Even Gandalf’s moth friend is bigger than normal.
Incidentally the city of Birmingham England has renamed a nature reserve that was one of Tolkien’s inspirations to “The Shire”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/west_midlands/4147809.stm
And I thought you were talking about the Thunderbird! What a letdown! 😉
Jimmy,
Have you seen the article from Reuters about some scientist who is claiming that the earthquake in Asia was so powerful is has sped up the rotation of the earth and permanently altered time? I thought it was pretty interesting.
Very interesting, Jason. Some folks at work also told me that that quake also caused the earth to tilt more on its axis. Haven’t been able to verify that in print.
An eagle with a 10 foot wingspan and 33lb body is much small than the Eagles of Manwe.
Gandalf’s moth friend was a J-text variation. Not from the scald. Though it wasn’t over-large for a luna moth, which it appeared to be.
Aren’t luna moths green?
I saw a show on either National Geographic Channel or Discovery Channel on this extinct New Zealand organism. The show implied that the organism hunted humans, among other prey, since they coexisted on New Zealand.
I doubt humans became “regular prey”, but over a long amount of years it is unlikely that a human, for instance an elderly man gathering nuts in a field, was NEVER killed by the giant bird.
They may have tried to prey on us, but if so, they lost.
Died out about 200 years after humans arrived on the island.
Same thing tends to happen to megafauna whenever humans show up.
3 Axes Of Rotation
There are 3 axis of translation right-left, forward-back, up-down;