When Wild Ain't Real

Like many on that day, I was stunned to learn of Steve Irwin's death. Back when I still had an Astro subscription, the "Crocodile Hunter" was a welcome distraction, as were his other fellow wildlife-championing daredevils.

Years later, comes this point of view, which would change my perceptions of the Crocodile Hunters of TV forever.

King cobra: "I'm a celebrity?
Get me outta here!" Photo
from here.

"Five years on, the pet-and-pester approach he pioneered has become the standard way for nature programs to produce cheap dramatic footage — reality TV with claws," writes Andrew Marshall in that piece. "Turn on any channel and you'll see Irwin lookalikes hassling animals. They declaim their love of nature, while unwittingly recording our dysfunctional relationship with it, teaching our children to both fear and subjugate creatures already pushed to the brink of extinction."


Dancing with death
Anybody remember Austin Stevens? The "snakeman, herpetologist, adventurer, photographer, filmmaker" and "author"? I do. But not Andrew Marshall, apparently. The shift in thought I'd just mentioned was reinforced when watching him again one day.

In an episode of Austin Steven's Most Dangerous, he was looking for a king cobra. At one point he voiced his frustrations at not being able to find one. Then, by the law of the last 15 minutes - huzzah! - they found a wild specimen. Watching him sweatily dance around a snake that just wanted to get the hell out of there was excruciating. Not content to get his photos, he also wanted to pet the snake, something he "wanted to do" for years. And when he does, oh boy, does he sound ever so elated.

If you'd seen it, you'd be rooting for the snake, too.

Even before Steve-O's untimely demise, the nature show machine was already becoming more and more mass-market. It's good television, provided that the core messages were also being sent. Now, I'm no longer sure that's the case.

Well... maybe these wildlife experts are experts. Maybe they do love nature enough to know they shouldn't molest potentially lethal species for television. Maybe there are times when they would advise against all these stunts.

But TV demands an audience, one that's developing an appetite for mindless action and gore nurtured by the entertainment and games industry. And so, even experts have to bend over and violate a few moral tenets for exposure and a living. Kind of like the chefs in those reality and travels shows.


Sending (and receiving) the wrong signals
While the proliferation of celebrity chefs would do relatively little harm, I feel that the nature show industrial complex played a role in the mess caused by the exotic pet industry. A few TV shows and an Internet-enabled device and somebody's an "expert" on Burmese pythons and monitor lizards.

Did they miss the part about Burmese pythons being able to grow up to 7 feet long within a year, if cared for properly? Or that a 10-footer can easily kill a child? Or the massive sizes they can achieve if kept alive for years?

Exotic pet industry advocates say the trade creates jobs, fosters understanding about wildlife and the environment, and so on. Well, the firearms industry creates jobs too. But people can't be counted on to be responsible with their pets or guns all the time.

These exotic pet traders expect their customers to be knowledgeable and responsible pet keepers. The Burmese and African rock python invasion of Florida's Everglades is the result, possibly due to the negligence of a few irresponsible individuals. The snakehead "invasion" in Maryland was reportedly caused by one fellow.

And how does taking a Burmese python out of Burma help in understanding nature and the environment? Or help in conservation, even? Why should little Timmy have a bearded dragon, just because it's cool to have one and "Mark down in Shepford Avenue has one too and oh, his dad keeps a Gaboon viper"?

"Muskingum... oh G*d, that was awful.
I close my eyes and I can still see it...
Photo from here.

The so-called wild creatures can't demonstrate their roles in their natural habitat when they're not in their natural habitat. Nor can they speak for themselves, which is why we need real animal experts. I don't think the commercial exotic pet trade helps with this at all.

Those traded animals that didn't come from a factory farm were likely caught illegally from habitats that may not afford the loss of these species. The National Geographic article on the Asian wildlife trade still fills me with shame and fury, as does the extermination of the animals in Muskingum, Ohio.

And how can these wild creatures be compared to other domesticated animals such as dogs and cats? A pet shop is not a Toys-R-Us. Kids will get bored with their toys, just as they will with pets. And there are no recycle bins for unwanted African rock pythons or Indian star turtles.


Coming home to roost - or nest
We often fail to understand that many of this planet's creatures evolved to perform certain duties necessary to keep the circle of life going. The effects of any unnatural tampering of this circle may not be known for years and by the time they're felt, it's often to late.

With regards to pythons in the Everglades, nobody knows exactly how these snakes react when placed in a foreign habitat. Will they be eventually killed by the climate, or will they evolve to fill the niche they're placed in?

Wildlife experts now fear the possibility of the latter, a worst-case scenario where these pythons would spread beyond Florida or, worse, breed a hybrid Burmese-African super python.

Sceptics argue that snakes won't survive the winters outside Florida and, hell, we ain't seen a super snake yet. That's because the twain hath never met - Burma, Africa, you know. But now that both species are sharing the same neighbourhood, it may only be a matter of time.


Keep it real
Not to denigrate the good work these wildlife warriors do off-camera, but I don't really feel the action-adventure circuit does much good for wildlife conservation or the reputation of the related professions in the long run.

Not when the nature channels appear to be pandering more and more to the action-adventure- and blood-and-guts-loving demographic, distilling their subjects down to tiny yummy, bloody bites for an increasingly attention-deficient dumbed-down audience.

I'm not sure they dance with crocs or wrestle great white sharks onto boats for tagging, measuring and DNA sampling for the glam. It's hard work, more a labour of love or a duty to inform. Cliché, perhaps, but that's what I'd like to believe.

(I've not heard of researchers who treat field work as a "job", but I'm sure they exist).

Just as these shows reduce these dedicated men and women to Crocodile Hunters, Snake Busters or Shark Men, these wild animals and their roles in their exclusive ecological niches are similarly reduced to just stripes, spots, fins, scales and sharp teeth, to be gawked at, feared or admired, and perhaps owned. Trophies, trinkets, ornaments. Status symbols.

These people and the wildlife they work with are more than that. And it's time we all learn how much.


I wrote this back in 2012, partly in response to an article that commemorated Steve Irwin, a few years after his death. Things are hectic at the company, which is why there are more pictures than prose around here these days, and only when I can be bothered - not even enough time to compile the space-filling listicles I used to be fond of.

"Z" Marks The Spot

Could this book hold clues to the location of a lost city?

Spain was the first world power back in the day to arrive in the Americas. Its conquistadors had left quite an impression on the land and its natives, and gave the rest of us chilli, chocolate, Che Guevara, Ricky Martin, Shakira, Hugo Chavez, the FARC, Shining Path and Latin American telenovelas.

The image of the conquistador as a savage, greedy and hubristic prick with little to no knowledge, empathy or respect for foreign cultures is a familiar stereotype. The impact of such an image deepens when one sees similar traits in some modern armies. Today, they invade, fight and kill for oil or diamonds. Back then, they did it all for gold.

In some accounts the contrast between the New World and the Old is made deliberately stark: the armoured, bearded white man, versus the barely clothed cinnamon-skinned native who can't understand the former's obsession for the shiny yellow metal the latter finds on occasion.

Thus, the absurdity of measuring an object's worth by how it glistens in the sun and imagination is brought into focus.


A jungle mirage
From what they saw at places such as Tenochtitlan, and maybe because of fevers contracted from the jungle, the conquistadors believed many other such cities existed within the green hell that is the Amazon. Nobody is certain who was responsible for the old chestnut called El Dorado, a king so rich he covered himself with gold dust. The fever, however, has spread and persisted for centuries afterwards.

Former British soldier Percy Fawcett became convinced of the existence of one such mythical city, which he dubbed "Z", and set out to find it in 1925. His fate, like that of El Dorado, became a matter of speculation. Scores have failed, died or gone missing while looking for him and his lost city.

I'd first learned about Z from a Reader's Digest publication, Great Mysteries of the Past (1991). You pick up some amazing things from their books, pre-Wikipedia. With so much out there, a book can be a stable starting point for a paper chase. The book was also where I'd learnt how Antoine de Saint-Exupéry vanished during a reconnaissance flight in World War II.

How fascinating, I thought. But would I ever see the closing chapters?

In 2008, de Saint-Exupéry's disappearance was apparently answered when a German pilot claimed he may have shot down the French author's plane, but that claim is disputed. But between the two, the story of Z was more compelling.

And one day, the sequel - and a possible ending - stumbled in like an unexpected guest.


Lost no more?
Literary journalist David Grann, author of the well-spoken-of The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon, wrote what looks like a dispatch from the Amazon where, he says, the lost city might have existed upon a time. It's an enlightening, revelatory piece that makes sense in the light of other discoveries and theories about several other lost civilisations. The Lost City of Z was named Barnes and Noble's single best non-fiction book of 2009 and received good reviews.

Percy Fawcett, explorer at large

Earlier, I'd read a similarly intriguing National Geographic article of the rise and fall of the Maya. Around the time the piece was written, climate change was emerging as a hot topic, and experts contend that the weather, together with overdevelopment, deforestation and, perhaps, the unsustainable luxurious lifestyles of the elite contributed to the decline or collapse of some old civilisations, including the Maya and Khmer.

One report suggested that, where the Maya was concerned, prolonged, minor reductions in rainfall were enough to push the civilisation closer to the brink. Makes you wonder just how screwed up the water management system had to be.

But if Grann is correct, the Maya and Aztec weren't the only city-builders in the continent. Some of the native tribes that now live in the Amazon jungle, he suggests, may have once been a metropolitan bunch. In his dispatch, he meets archaeologist Michael Heckenberger at a dig site in the Amazon.

"I want to show you something," Heckenberger said at one point.

... After walking for a mile or so, we reached an area where the forest thinned. Heckenberger pointed to the ground with his machete. "See how the land dips?" he asked.

Indeed, the ground seemed to slope downward for a long stretch, then tilt upward again, as if someone had carved out an enormous ditch.

"It's a moat," Heckenberger said.

"What do you mean, a moat?"

"A moat. A defensive ditch." He added, "From nearly nine hundred years ago."

... Heckenberger said that the moat had originally been between a dozen and sixteen feet deep, and about fifty feet wide. It was nearly a mile in diameter. I thought of "the long, deep ditches" that the spirit Fitsi-fitsi was said to have built around settlements. "The Kuikuros knew they existed, but they didn't realize that their own ancestors had built them," Heckenberger said.

Heckenberger also pointed out several other features of what he says used to be a vast ancient settlement: walls, plazas, canals, causeways, and possibly roads to other similar settlements. He'd also found broken pottery at the site.

It was understandable why Fawcett wouldn't have been able to see it, Heckenberger went on. "There isn't a lot of stone in the jungle, and most of the settlement was built with organic materials—wood and palms and earth mounds—which decompose," he said. "But once you begin to map out the area and excavate it you are blown away by what you see."

So there may have been cities in the Amazon once, just not the gigantic gilt Xanadus dreamed up by malarial conquistadors and legend-seeking white explorers. So what? Why is it so hard to accept that ancients humans used to be capable of a lot of things, without the aid of gods or aliens?

Besides, these ancients didn't really vanish. After surviving what Heckenberger calls "a holocaust from European contact", the formerly settlement-dwelling Indians gradually adopted a more low-key lifestyle - like how some dinosaurs apparently shrunk and learned to fly. "That's why the first Europeans in the Amazon described such massive settlements that, later, no one could ever find," he concludes.

"Poor Fawcett—he was so close," said Grann's local guide, Paolo Pinage.


The past can return
What Heckenberger found so far, in my opinion, lends weight to the fragility of what we refer to as 'modern civilisation'.

For instance: Radio interviews a while back suggest that Selangor doesn't have a proper contingency plan that would prevent what happened in 1998 when taps ran dry in parts of the Klang Valley. What would happen if a similar drought repeats itself?

We can't say much about people thousands of years ago, but with our science and technology, surely it's a cop-out to blame the climate for everything and not take some responsibility for how we're trashing our environment with our wild ways.

Before we know it, we could be on the verge of a similar cataclysm that ended civilisations symbolised by Fawcett's lost city of Z. Bereft of all that our modern, fast-paced civilisation depends upon, would we see or learn to accept the wilderness we once scorned as our salvation?

Frogs

The frog is an amphibian, meaning it lives in both water and land. Most frogs have long hind legs, a short body, webbed digits and no tail. They move on land by jumping or climbing. Frogs are generally recognised as the best jumper of all vertebrates. The Australian rocket frog, for instance, can leap over fifty times its body length, resulting in jumps of over two meters.

Frogs usually lay their eggs in water. Their young, called tadpoles, have gills and grow up in water. Adult frogs eat mostly worms, insects and other small invertebrates. The most fearsome muncher is the American bullfrog, which is considered a pest and known to devour small birds and rodents. Frogs have a noisy call, which is usually loud and most frequently heard during mating seasons. Most frog species are found in tropical rainforests.

Despite having lungs, frogs can breathe through their skin, which must remain moist in order for this to happen. This makes the slimy amphibians the canaries in the goldmine when it comes to air and water pollution. With heaps of frogs worldwide dying each year, the planet must be quite sick indeed.

Frogs are mostly edible, except for species such as the poison dart frogs of Latin and South America; one lick or touch can be potentially deadly. In certain Southeast Asian countries, frogs' legs are steamed with garlic, ginger or essence of chicken, to create nearly chicken-like dishes, or in the preparation of congee. The Fallopian tubes of a certain frog are extracted, cleaned (in a fashion) and dried and sold as hasma, a food the Chinese consider as "cooling", with skin-nourishing properties.

Personally, I wouldn't mind the occasional bowl of hasma, but when it comes to chicken-like meat, give me the real thing any day.

So that's my take frogs. What about the other kind?

Who's The Aggressor Here?

Another shark attack victim dies in Australia.

Amongst the polite pleas to not take it out on the sharks - like they did with stingrays after one of them shanked Steve Irwin, were comments calling for a shark hunt, and to "put 'em in their rightful place - a cat-food tin".

And what's this about "making an example of a few of them"? Did I read that right? Did they just compare animals to terrorists? Is there even a United Denizens of the Deep (UDD) we humans can negotiate with? Oh, yeah, like it will so work, well, because... we're, like, the good guys!

Aussie rednecks. They think anything is possible after a dozen beers.

Sharks, like all natural predators, eat the slow, weak, sick and dying (which sheds light on some surfers), leaving the seas to the strong, bright and healthy. They also keep the oceans clean by gobbling dead and decomposing sea creatures, lovely breeding grounds for potentially nasty bacteria. Sharks are also biological wonders whose healing and sensory powers are being investigated by scientific, medical and military agencies.

If they all ended up in cat-food tins, Neptune's realm will see a massive free-for-all that will have bigger fish gobbling up smaller table fish and their young. Unlike us, Ma Nature's hunter-killers don't catch more than what they could eat. We already kill tons of sharks each year - most of them finned, speared and as by-catch. On average, less than twenty fatal attacks are reported annually worldwide.

And so far, no spokesfish for the sharks have approached the UN asking for an audience or offering coral branches of peace.

Sharks may be ugly and uncuddly, but unless we're willing to replace them as the ecosystem's euthanists, garbagemen and biohazard crew, we should shut the hell up, give them a wide berth, and just be extra careful every time we go out to sea.

Piltdown Rakshasa

This looked too good to pass up.

National Geographic recently published news of an old Internet hoax to put to rest the notion that giants used to exist. A local Indian paper actually reported the "find", which allegedly came from north India and confirms the existence of giants from the Mahabharata epic (the paper later retracted the report).

Did somebody appeal to that country for help against oppression? Do they believe in apsaras¹ as well?

The society is no stranger to scams. The biggest one in recent history was the discovery of a missing link between dinosaurs and birds. The find, called the Archaeoraptor, was eventually exposed as a fake (one version suggests that the fossil was actually assembled in haste and sold to black marketeers by the villager who found it, sullying the "Made in China" tag even further).

Although National Geographic issued a public apology over the Archaeoraptor flap (pun so very much intended), some publications were not so forgiving, cheekily dubbing the scandal, "The Case of the Piltdown Chicken". Creationists and Bible-thumpers also had a field day. Since then, other fossils of bird-like dinos have been found, but scientists are more careful with these finds.

I suspect however, that in India, hope springs eternal.


¹ Celestial handmaidens in Hindu myth, similar to the Persian houris.

² Rakshasas are considered demons, and not all of them are gigantic in size.

If You See Red, Don't Go Green

Will Greenpeace See Red?
I've always been ambivalent towards green groups like Greenpeace. Over the years public sympathy and funding have morphed them from a free-floating fringe group into something akin to a political party. As everyone knows: When a group professing altruism becomes political, things invariably go wrong.

I remember an old Readers' Digest article about how their "Save the Seals" campaign, led by that witch Brigitte Bardot, ruined an Inuit community by depriving them of a livelihood. Today, the Inuit are hunting seals again, as well as - what I regard as a slap-in-the-face for Greenpeace - Canadian fisherman, who partake in an annual seal slaughter to eliminate the competition for cod, pollock and salmon, while earning a profit doing it.

How long will it be before they cross over to the dark side and employ the terrorist tactics so favoured by loony legions like PETA and various animal welfare groups, who pick the easy battles and ignore the good fights?


Life After Whales
It confounds me that Japan, a well-spring of innovation and improvisation, is in no hurry to find a solution for the sword of Damocles hovering over dozens of fishing communities who supplement their income by killing or capturing whales and dolphins: "What the hell do we do, once we drive them all to extinction?" There's one Japanese fisherman who has given up whaling and dolphin hunting to organise whale watching tours. Others may not be as receptive to the radical idea that a live whale is just as valuable as a dead one.

Maritime patrols would be a good career path for former whalers. Pirates? Terrorists? Straying North Korean vessels? Suicidal Greenpeace pontoons? Imagine the large metal shank of a harpoon several feet long protruding out of the eye-socket of some stubborn captain of a trespassing ship. What other "Don't Bleeping Mess With Us" message could be more straight-to-the... -point?

Whale Safari, Redefined

Whale-watching tourists in Norway were given a first-hand look at the country's whaling industry when an animal they were watching was harpooned. The carnage was not taken well by the tourists. I wonder if any children were on deck at that moment?

The blood flowed and it wasn't a pretty sight. This really wasn't what we came to see.

— Leontien Dieleman, Dutch tourist

No shit, Leon. Whale-watching-slash-whaling tours, while economical and possibly educational, will never catch on. Not until the nasty bits of the business are resolved, anyway.

While Japan stoops to bribing poorer countries in the International Whaling Commission (IWC) for control over whaling restrictions, Norway doesn't even bother with politics or pretensions. This, however, goes beyond "rubbing it in your face".

Beware of Cat

Another reason to respect cats:

Jack, a 15-pound orange and white cat, keeps a close vigil on his property, often chasing small animals, but his owners and neighbors say his latest escapade was surprising.

"We used to joke, 'Jack's on duty,' never knowing he'd go after a bear," owner Donna Dickey told The Star-Ledger of Newark for Friday's editions.

— via Yahoo! News

Note that only male cats are that territorial. The black bear in question is probably an adolescent or a newcomer in the neighbourhood. Either way, any creature that encounters a cat for the first time wouldn't have known what to make of a hissing furball with claws and teeth.

Had it been an orange and black cat, there'd be plenty of Garfield references.

Do Not Pet Snakes

The issues raised in the National Geographic Special America's Deadly Obsession: Snakes is nothing new; after all, it's just an extension of what my previous entry was all about: the average American's ignorance and hubris when it comes to dangerous wildlife. Both involved real snake experts who got careless, and both happened on September 11th, 2001. One died; the other lived. There's even a report of a guy who was strangled to death by his pet python.

Yet Americans continue to buy exotic and venomous pets, and release them into the wild when they get too tough to handle. Buying saw-scaled vipers from Pakistan. Baby cobras. Black and green mambas. Reticulated pythons. Gaboon vipers. King cobras. Taipans.

What strange, warped, heavily medicated or intoxicated mind would consider the above as pets? Playthings? Worst of all, these species aren't even native to North and South America, which already boast some lethal species like the eastern diamondback rattlesnake, cottonmouth, and lance-head vipers. Consider the following:

• King cobra: Possibly the largest venomous snake in the world. Neurotoxic venom, delivered in large doses, kills by paralysis. Can take down an elephant.
• Saw-scaled viper: Small, agile and bad-tempered - like most Middle Easterners it shares the environment with. Strikes very quickly. Probably used to kill Ramses III.
• Black mamba: From Africa. Fastest snake in the world. Aggressive; will stand its ground if cornered. Will bite multiple times. Its neurotoxic venom is deadly.
• Gaboon viper: One of the largest vipers in Africa. Haemotoxic venom that turns flesh into a soft Slurpee-like consistency is delivered via a pair of five centimetre fangs.
• Taipan: Native to Australia, and distant cousin of the cobra. Some species carry neurotoxic venom that is far more lethal than their cousins.

All this gives me the impression that the American attitude towards danger is pathological, extending all the way to the White House. I'm sure that Carter, Reagan and Bushes Sr and Jr thought that the two-bit dictators, warlords and extremists they used to coddle were cuddly and harmless too, until they grew too big and too dangerous.

Just Who Is King of The Jungle Here?

This is one of those cases where the American freedom of expression supports a cause borne of a warped sense of altruism: Keeping a pet lion.

This family's case is not unique in the US. Across the country, people buy and keep exotic pets: lions, tigers, bears, pythons, leopards, etc "out of love" and the "spirit of conservation". Most of these animals are rejects left behind after a zoo, circus or animal park goes under, and they go relatively cheap at exotic pet markets.

I won't doubt that some of these pet owners are really serious about their charges. However, all of this pales in comparison with the real significance of these animals in the wild. The big cats keep the number of grazing herd animals in check. That's what they were built for, and nothing else. Everything in the wild was hunky-dory until we humans came along. We found fire, invented the axe, and bred like viruses. We took over the job of hunter-killer, effectively firing the native predators from their jobs.

Keeping wild predators as pets is not an act of love or mercy on our part.

It's an insult.

Giant Squid Caught on Video

They finally did it! Scientists have finally caught a giant squid on video. What's the big deal, you say? It's just a squid. A sotong. Jiu hu. Market also have.

Not really.

Randy Kochevar, deep sea biologist with the Monterey aquarium, via Yahoo! News: "Nobody has been able to observe a large giant squid where it lives. There are people who said it would never be done."

Well, they did it. It may be possible to expect more footage of these once-
mysterious denizens of the deep.

The giant squid (genus architeuthis) can grow to be over twenty feet long from head to tentacle-tip. They are usually found around 1000 feet deep, but can surface to find food. No living specimen has ever been caught alive, even on camera - at least, up till now. We can't even breed one of these in a lab.

You do not want to bump into this creature when it's hungry. If its arms don't squeeze the life out of you, it'll drag you to its mouth, where a strong parrot-like beak waits to tear you into bite-size bits. It's not really tasty, either; it's full of ammonium chloride, which helps keep it from sinking to the bottom - and kind of smells like pee.

While chances of swimmers actually meeting a giant squid are nearly zero, its smaller cousin, the Humboldt squid (a real jiu hu), is no less ferocious. They will attack and eat each other. The fishermen who catch this squid call it the Red Devil, and are more afraid of it than sharks.

Would your opinions of the squid ever be the same again?

Seafaring Riverboats, Unarmoured Humvees

We've all heard about how Kublai Khan's failed invasion of Japan, thwarted by the kamikaze or divine wind, that capsized his fleet of over four thousand ships. Centuries later, the young stupid suicide pilots of the Japanese air force would invoke the name of this conquering tempest when they ploughed their planes into enemy warships during World War II.

A recent archaeological expedition has revealed some startling truths about the Khan's failed venture, and downplayed the role played by the storm, long touted as the main factor.

Never mind that the Mongols knew scratch about sailing or sea battles, or that Japanese swordsmen were lethal in close-quarters combat. There were hints that Chinese ship makers commissioned into building the fleet had used shoddy workmanship as a means of sabotage. Kublai's impatience was also a factor; to complete his massive fleet within the unreasonable schedule, riverboats - totally unseaworthy vessels - were also drafted into the fleet.

The fleet had sunk even before it left the dry-docks.

We are strange, you know. We store history and quote from it, but never learn anything from it. Even today, people are still rushing to war with vague mission statements, poor preparation, and misleading preconceptions and lousy intelligence about the other side. When it all ends, usually in failure, the common folk have to bear the cost of the aftermath.

But we don't have to look back eight hundred years to learn about the folly of rushing to war. We only need to go back about two years.

Tut: The Final Conclusion

Tutankhamun, the famous boy-king of ancient Egypt, is famous for a few things: his parentage, short life and short reign; his world-famous funerary treasures; the "mummy's curse" and the rumours about his death.

Especially about his death.

He lived in a very screwed-up time (one of many) in ancient Egypt, no thanks to his predecessor, Akhenaten, who dismantled a centuries-old social order and nearly caused the country's collapse. So hated was Akhenaten and his bloodline that great measures were taken to erase them from history. The gaps in this time frame, dubbed the Amarna period, left plenty of room for scholars to explore - and pad.

For a while, the juiciest theory about his death was that of murder; Tut's vizier may have plotted his king's death and married the royal widow to seize the throne. To prove or disprove this theory, Tut's tomb and his mummy have been thoroughly examined. The initial findings seemed to confirm the murder theory. Along with clues of a hasty burial, possible genetic defects and court intrigue, the "murder mystery" continued to tantalise many for years.

Early this year however, the Egyptians decided to conduct their own investigation (covered in the National Geographic documentary, Tut: Resurrected) with the help of CT scans. They concluded that Tut's death was caused by something more mundane: an infected knee fracture. Tomb paintings show that Tut was an avid outdoorsman, and that he fought in a battle. In either case, an accident or an enemy caused the wound that ultimately killed him.

Pretty convenient.

When he was first found, Tut was "glued" into his coffin by the unguents used to mummify him, so a "Dr" Douglas Derry freed Tut from the coffin - by cutting him into pieces. That certainly didn't help those who would autopsy him in the future, nor did it improve the overall condition of the mummy. When they laid eyes on Tut, the Egyptian team was shocked at the damage Derry had done, and the subsequent deterioration of his mummy.

Were the more plausible findings released to snuff out the wilder theories regarding Tut, along with any future exhumations, and allow him to finally rest in peace?