Well we have a winner and that member is eileen! Well done, looking forward to the pic for Caption Competition #114. Here is the winning caption:
Oh heck I wasn't expacting that!! I'm off to find a piccie for the next comp. Thank you everyone for voting for my caption. :-D
By the way I noticed something strange about the caption competition image. What do you see in the silhouette:
Congrats Eileen, that's a good one. Frank, that is a heretofore unknown pre-historic creature that has been named Giraffasaurus, it's fossils have only recently been unearthed. It was one of natures failures and didn't survive in the animal gene pool for long. It has been speculated that when it was young it could easily reach up for leaves, chew and swallow. This would account for the lack of fossils of the young ones. At maturity it was large, larger than even the tallest trees which meant it had to lower it's head to eat, therein causing the major design flaw to come to light. At the moment it reached it's maximum height, it only got to taste one more mouth full of food for when it tried to raise it's head to chew and swallow it found it didn't have the strength to lift a mass that large, resulting in the poor creature choking to death. This is only speculation on the part of scientists but it sure makes sense to me.
There was a footnote speculating on what those legs/arms were used for. One thought was maybe they were used as a support for the head to take some of the strain off the back muscles as the creature ate. The legs would be positioned on the trunk or a very large upward growing limb, letting the back muscles relax a bit and give the head more mobility. Another thought was that they were simply a design element that either didn't have the chance to prove itself useful and was shriveling up or was a design element that had just begun to appear on the creatures and had not reached it's full potential before the extinction of the creature. One humorous scientist (yes there are such things) suggested that maybe this creature was designed by the same committee that came up with the Duck-billed Platypus. That this was yet another creature they could not agree on the making of, so they just stuck odd bits here and there.
