Call Her 'Flash:' Overclocked Elephant Shrew Outwits & Outruns Lizard

"LIFE - Rufous Sengi Outwits Hungry Lizard | Mammals"

DiscoveryNetworks, YouTube (March 23, 2010)
video, 2:57

"...A rufous sengi uses an intricate network of trails to outwit a hungry lizard."

Actually, outwits and outlasts.

Mammals use (waste?) a great deal of energy maintaining a stable body temperature. That means that we have to eat a whole lot more than, say, a reptile of the same mass.

So why aren't the eco-friendly reptiles filling all ecological niches, and mammals long since extinct? Well, turns out that critters with a comparatively huge carbon footprint, like the elephant shrew - or anything that's warm-blooded - are generally smarter than their reptilian counterparts. And we can keep running longer.

A lot longer.

No question about it: mammals "waste" a huge amount of delicate(?) Earth's precious resources. But we've been around for 65,000,000 years or so, and frail little Mother Nature seems to be doing okay.

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