The path food takes from your mouth to your butt is about 25 feet!
The Emperor's Eggs
The Emperor's Eggs "Science is a big thing if you can travel a Winter
Journey in her cause and not regret it". These are the words
written by Apsley Cherry-Garrard, the sole survivor of a winter
journey in Antarctica in 1911. The expedition was organised to
search for penguin eggs. At that time, the head of the scientific
party was convinced — wrongly, as it turned out — that
emperor penguins were the most primitive of all birds. It was
reasoned that by obtaining embryos, it might be possible to trace
penguins' ancestry, even finding the missing link between birds and
reptiles.
Gabrielle Walker, nearly 90 years later, retraces their steps the
modern way—by helicopter. The eggs lie on a bed of cotton
wool in a glass-lidded box at a tiny outpost in the Hertfordshire
village of Tring, England. Why are the eggs so important when they
told us so little? Perhaps because of the efforts that they
represent in the time before helicopters, radios and snowmobiles.
They set the stage for scientific research in
Antarctica. 17 APRIL 1999, P. 42-47
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