Tyson, Perdue Recall More Than 120,000 Pounds of Chicken Nuggets Combined

All those chickens! Every time we get these massive meat recalls I think of the poor animals that died for no reason.
This month, two of the nation's largest chicken companies, Tyson and Perdue, have together pulled more than 120,000 pounds of nugget products from shelves and freezers.
Tyson Foods is recalling approximately 36,420 pounds of chicken nugget products because they may be contaminated with rubber, the U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) Food Safety and Inspection Service announced Tuesday.
Customers complained after they found pieces of "soft, blue rubber" inside, the Associated Press reported. Apparently, the rubber came from a piece of equipment that got pinched and made its way into the nugget blend, a Tyson representative explained to the AP, adding that the company has placed measures to prevent another such snafu.
Tyson Foods is recalling more than 36,000 pounds of chicken nuggets because they may be contaminated with rubber.… https://t.co/TFyz6yLq2H— AJ+ (@AJ+)1548861832.0
Specifically, Tyson's recall applies to 5-pound packages of white meat panko chicken nuggets produced on Nov. 26, 2018, the notice said. They have a "BEST IF USED BY" date of Nov. 26, 2019 and a case code of 3308SDL03 and bear establishment number "P-13556" inside the USDA mark of inspection. These plastic-wrapped packs were shipped to retail locations nationwide.
Tyson's recall came not long after Perdue Foods issued two back-to-back recalls of its own chicken nugget products earlier this month.
Perdue recalled 16,011 pounds of "Fun Shapes Chicken Breast Nuggets" due to misbranding and undeclared allergens, the USDA announced Monday. The dinosaur-shaped products contain milk, a known allergen, which is not declared on the product label.
A week before that, Perdue also recalled 68,244 pounds of its "Simply Smart Organics Gluten Free Chicken Breast Nuggets" due to possible contamination with pieces of wood.
All together, Tyson's potentially rubber-filled nuggets (36,420 pounds), plus Perdue's undeclared-allergen nuggets (16,011 pounds) and its potentially wood-filled nuggets (68,244 pounds) makes a combined total of 120,675 pounds of recalled chicken products.
Let's do some math. Say the average weight of a broiler chicken is 6 pounds before slaughter. Take away the parts of the chicken we don't eat, plus breading and whatever else is used in nugget mix—oh and wood and rubber scraps—my back-of-the napkin calculations say that's roughly 20,112 chickens that were killed for food that will go uneaten. That figure may be wildly inaccurate but these recalls always deal in pounds instead of the number of lives.
It's not even the end of January, folks. Anyone else want to extend Veganuary for another month?
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By Aaron W Hunter
A chance discovery of a beautifully preserved fossil in the desert landscape of Morocco has solved one of the great mysteries of biology and paleontology: how starfish evolved their arms.
The Pompeii of palaeontology. Aaron Hunter, Author provided
<h2></h2><p>Although starfish might appear very robust animals, they are typically made up of lots of hard parts attached by ligaments and soft tissue which, upon death, quickly degrade. This means we rely on places like the Fezouata formations to provide snapshots of their evolution.</p><p>The starfish fossil record is patchy, especially at the critical time when many of these animal groups first appeared. Sorting out how each of the various types of ancient starfish relate to each other is like putting a puzzle together when many of the parts are missing.</p><h2>The Oldest Starfish</h2><p><em><a href="https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/216101v1.full.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Cantabrigiaster</a></em> is the most primitive starfish-like animal to be discovered in the fossil record. It was discovered in 2003, but it has taken over 17 years to work out its true significance.</p><p>What makes <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> unique is that it lacks almost all the characteristics we find in brittle stars and starfish.</p><p>Starfish and brittle stars belong to the family Asterozoa. Their ancestors, the Somasteroids were especially fragile - before <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> we only had a handful of specimens. The celebrated Moroccan paleontologist Mohamed <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.palaeo.2016.06.041" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Ben Moula</a> and his local team was instrumental in discovering <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0031018216302334?via%3Dihub" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">these amazing fossils</a> near the town of Zagora, in Morocco.</p><h2>The Breakthrough</h2><p>Our breakthrough moment came when I compared the arms of <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> with those of modern sea lilles, filter feeders with long feathery arms that tend to be attached to the sea floor by a stem or stalk.</p><p>The striking similarity between these modern filter feeders and the ancient starfish led our team from the University of Cambridge and Harvard University to create a new analysis. We applied a biological model to the features of all the current early Asterozoa fossils in existence, along with a sample of their closest relatives.</p>Cantabrigiaster is the most primitive starfish-like animal to be discovered in the fossil record. Aaron Hunter, Author provided
<p>Our results demonstrate <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> is the most primitive of all the Asterozoa, and most likely evolved from ancient animals called crinoids that lived 250 million years before dinosaurs. The five arms of starfish are a relic left over from these ancestors. In the case of <em>Cantabrigiaster</em>, and its starfish descendants, it evolved by flipping upside-down so its arms are face down on the sediment to feed.</p><p>Although we sampled a relatively small numbers of those ancestors, one of the unexpected outcomes was it provided an idea of how they could be related to each other. Paleontologists studying echinoderms are often lost in detail as all the different groups are so radically different from each other, so it is hard to tell which evolved first.</p>President Joe Biden officially took office Wednesday, and immediately set to work reversing some of former President Donald Trump's environmental policies.
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