Cassowaries have powerful legs and feet that enable them to run up to 50 km/hr and jump as high as 1.5 m. Their feet are equipped with sharp claws and the inner toe is formed into a long dagger-like claw that can be a formidable weapon.

The farmers get pissed when you walk through their fields.

On Feb. 27, as Sparling paddled ahead, a large black-and-white woodpecker flew across the bayou less than 70 feet in front of Gallagher and Harrison, who simultaneously cried out: "Ivory-bill!" Minutes later, after the bird had disappeared into the forest, Gallagher and Harrison sat down to sketch independently what each had seen. Their field sketches, included in the Science article, show the characteristic patterns of white and black on the wings of the woodpecker.

"When we finished our notes," Gallagher said, "Bobby sat down on a log, put his face in his hands and began to sob, saying, 'I saw an ivory-bill. I saw an ivory-bill.'" Gallagher said he was too choked with emotion to speak. "Just to think this bird made it into the 21st century gives me chills. It's like a funeral shroud has been pulled back, giving us a glimpse of a living bird, rising Lazarus-like from the grave," he said.

A large, dramatic-looking bird, the ivory-billed woodpecker was known to be shy and to prefer the deep woods of the U.S. Southeast. It was sometimes nicknamed the "Lord God bird," Fitzpatrick said.

"It is such a striking bird. When people would see it they would say, 'Lord God what a woodpecker.' That's where it came from," he said.

Clement VII’s shrewdness determined how the Church would deal with the proliferation of Bibles. Clement was personally advised by the cagey Niccolo Machiavelli, inventor of modern political science, and Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, Chancellor of England. Machiavelli and Wolsey opined that both printing and Protestantism could be turned to Rome’s advantage by employing movable type to produce a literature that would confuse, diminish, and ultimately marginalize the Bible. Cardinal Wolsey, who would later found Christ Church College at Oxford, characterized the project as to put “learning against learning.”

Against the Bible’s learning, which demonstrated how man could have eternal life simply by believing in the facts of Christ’s death and resurrection, would be put the learning of the gnostics. Gnosticism held out the hope that man could achieve everlasting life by doing good works himself. To put it succinctly, Bible-learning was Christ-centered; gnostic learning was man-centered.

An enormous trove of gnostic learning had been brought from the eastern Mediterranean by agents of Clement VII’s great-grandfather, Cosimo d’Medici. Suppressed since the Emperor Justinian had piously shut down the pagan colleges of Athens back in 529, these celebrated mystical, scientific and philosophical scrolls and manuscripts flattered humanity. They taught that human intelligence was competent to determine truth from falsehood without guidance or assistance from any god. Since, as Protagoras put it, “man is the measure of all things,” man could control all the living powers of the universe. If elected and initiated into the secret knowledge, or gnosis, man could master the cabalah – the “royal science” of names, numbers, and symbols – to create his very own divinity.

Cosimo had stored huge quantities of this pagan material in his library in Florence. The Medici Library, whose final architect was Michaelangelo, welcomed scholars favored by the papacy. These scholars, not surprisingly, soon began emulating the papacy in focusing more upon humanity than upon the Old and New Testaments. So extensive was the Medici Library’s philosophical influence that even scholars today consider it the cradle of Western civilization.