In a desperate bid to gauge African climate patterns, English scientists have leapt to the wild savannas with angle grinders to saw off shards of age old crystallized animal urine.
The small hairy hyrax, a relative of the graceful elephant, has been known to frequent specific locations to relieve itself, intergenerationally – over thousands of years.
It is this urine, long discharged onto the plains of old, which harbours ancient secrets into the animal’s diet, vegetation and thus the local climate at the time of relief.
Fortunately for today’s innovative researcher, this hyrax pee has been preserved inside rock hard crystallized accumulations termed ‘middens’, which can be penetrated with an old angle grinder from the backyard shed.
Whilst samples from bogs or lakes usually suffice for such research, the parched savannas of Africa proved uncooperative, and a specialised team of crack scientists from Leicester were called in to administer unorthodox perverse tactics.
Lead researcher, Dr Bill Hydro, termed by his former colleagues a “filthy demented monomaniac”, has been living off bin scraps whilst conducting research from used books in the feral wastelands for the past ten years.
Dr Hydro says he was initially inspired by the old Chinese proverb – ‘though you live near a forest, do not waste firewood’, and has since gone on an investigatory rampage on waste utilisation, specialising in ancient urine, worldwide.