Granted This Could Get Funny

I always wondered about researchers who get grants to spend several years watching an animal in the animal's natural habitat. I always figured, if it were me, I would win an award to study some rare albino animal and how to adapts to its surroundings, I would be provided two years of substance, and after settling in the depths of the wildnerness with my cameras and blank journals, on my first day of following the albino animal, it’ll get eaten by another animal.

What does one do then? Keep the money and stay in the woods for two years? I think that would make for a lousy research project, and I suspect those who gave the grant would then want their money back. I suppose you could stuff the animal and pose it in various settings, but somehow I doubt that would advance science very much. "Why is the albino always in the exact same pose?" Then again, it might lead to further research grants as the scientific community debates the frozen expression of rare albino animals.

Which reminds me of one of the great scientific minds who figured out how to explain the previously baffling scientific theories of why nature would simultaneously develop two sets of dinosaurs that appear exactly alike except one set was much larger and the other set was much smaller. He became the master of achieving the explanation to this dilemma: the smaller dinosaur bones are the babies and the larger bones are the adults.