Calm yourself, GS.  The National Geographic video says plainly that it's a fossil like all others, just with fossilized skin and organs too.  This just means it was much less disturbed during the fossilization process than other fossils.

Great links Geoff.  Kind of odd that you stuck them randomly here, though.

When I got my case of salmonella, I drank a teaspoon of cold pressed apple cider vinegar in a glass of water.  The first dose stopped my diarrhea immediately, and after a couple doses take a couple hours apart my stomach and intestines felt calm enough to try eating.  After a day I was eating normally again, and after three days I stopped taking the vinegar water and the salmonella never came back.

I'd recommend this if the diarrhea is still a problem for you.

Eating their own feces is something a few herbivores do, mainly those that do not have the multiple-stomach digestive system of ruminants.  Omnivores, with the exception of pigs (which eat anything) and occasionally chimpanzees (which are largely herbivores in the wild) generally don't eat feces.  We're omnivores.  Feces is not something we're probably supposed to be eating.

And chill out.  No one's attacking you.  If AV wants to defend himself, he's capable of doing it himself.

The article that DR wrote on his blog is tough to argue against.  The things he attributes to AV are accurate, as best I can recall.  I can't vouch for the stories about people he personally knows and their maladies, of course.

As I've mentioned on other threads, I do not hold Aajonus Vanderplanitz in particularly high esteem.  I don't think RPDers gain any value by associating with him.  I agree with his assertions in some cases, but it's easy to interpret him as a goofball because of some of his more extreme and bewildering assertions (eating shit, for instance). 

I also got salmonella poisoning the one time I tried eating raw chicken.  I don't eat raw chicken anymore; I stick to herbivores exclusively.  I'll occasionally eat eggs, though.

The major reason you put your tea bag in hot water is not to cook the tea, but rather to speed the process of dissolving useful compounds out of the tea leaves or herbs into the water.  Water doesn't have to be hot for this to happen, but the cooler the water is the longer it takes to dissolve a meaningful amount of the compounds you want. 

What I've started doing is harvesting my own tea herbs, and drying them at room temperature and out of the sun (sunlight makes some compounds in some herbs more available, but breaks down most compounds in most herbs, rendering them less available and/or less medicinal).  Once the leaves are dried, I store them in airtight jars in a cool, dry, dark place.

When I want to consume them, I'll fill a jar with water, put in the herbs, and leave it out for a day or so, until the water takes on the color of the tea.  If I want something warming, I'll pour this (straining out the bits of herbs) into a pot and warm it slowly until it's above my body temperature but not hot enough that I feel like I'm at risk of being burned while my finger is in the warming water.  I've found that this is warm enough to give me the warming feeling I used to associate with hot tea, while still keeping the temperature low enough to avoid cooking the herbs.

Finally, although I have a lot of herbology books, I'm becoming skeptical of a lot of the claims made regarding the medicinal properties of herbs.  I think placebo effect plays an enormous role much (though not all) of the time.  I've also met several herbalists who doctor themselves with all their fantastic concoctions, and many of them just aren't healthy people.  That alone makes me wonder...

Still, some herbs are very nutrient dense, and are worth keeping around for winter when fresh green plants are gone.  I stock up on dandelion root, burdock root, red clover flowers, and nettle leaves.  The roots and the nettle leaves are among the most nutrient dense plant foods available in my part of the world, by virtue of their life strategies (i.e. send deep taproots into the subsoil to draw minerals up that most other plants don't gain access to).  I have to work for the dandelion and burdock roots, but nettle grows so abundantly that i can fill a pillowcase with fresh leaves in an hour.  Clover flowers yield an antioxidant rich, sweet tea that just tastes nice, and the flowers are very easy to gather, like nettle leaves.

I prefer marrow, but will also eat suet.  Marrow, when fresh, has a pleasant creamy flavor that reminds me of a mixture between butter and parmesan cheese. 

Phil, what supermarket do you get your marrow and suet from?  I usually special order from City Market.  I've only bought marrow once, as it came in a 6 pound bag and I only just finished it.  I've got another special order in there, just waiting for them to fill it as they don't get marrow every time they get a side of grass-fed-and-finished beef delivered.

My experience has been exactly the opposite.  I used to have dry skin, and I don't anymore.  Are you eating enough fat?

Since I started eating raw meat, I always have symptoms like you describe whenever I eat grains and the symptoms are particularly severe when I eat grains with meat.  I think that's where your symptoms are coming from, not from the fact that there were worms in the meat.

That said, you may end up with other symptoms from the worms if they get established.  I personally don't buy into the "parasites are fine" philosophy that many people here espouse.  There are a lot of wild animals that subsist on entirely raw, natural diets that will still show symptoms of pathology when infected with certain parasites.  Even on an ideal raw diet, parasites can still be a problem for people.

The RunAmoks have held up fine so far.  The build seems solid to me, and since the leather is so thin the seems would be easy to repair if their thread fails.  The pair with the thicker soles is wearing down a lot faster than the pair with the thinner soles, and the thicker soles seemed to bring me to the point of blisters sooner, so I stopped running in those quite soon and only ran substantially in the thinner soled version.  I don't expect I'll buy the thicker-soled version again.  I plan on buying a suede pair of the thinner-soled version for hunting season.

Let it be known, though, that I've stopped running in my RunAmoks, although I do walk around town in them and wear them to work.  As of last week I began running barefoot, breaking myself in very slowly.  I ran about 3 miles today, which was about a mile more than last week, and it turned out I added distance too fast.  I got a couple blisters, one of which was quite large and had a little blood in it.  It'll take a couple days to heal, and I'll ease back to 2 miles per outing until I feel compelled to start inching my way back up. 

Luckily for me I'm not training for a race, otherwise the setback in distance per day I've taken to get used to actually running barefoot would be very inconvenient.

Wolf, sounds like you're amassing a decent literature review.  Would you be so kind as to post it, or somehow make it available?

I just received my two pairs of Soft Star RunAmoks.  I haven't worn the pair with the heavier sole yet, but I've worn the pair with the thin sole around the house.  I am very pleased.  They yield the closest feel to brain-tanned moccasins that I've ever felt in a commercially made shoe.  The Vibram soles are thin and flexible, yet firm enough to be puncture resistant and the tread is quite nice.  Now that I see them in front of me and can walk around in a pair, I have even higher hopes for these minimalist shoes.

I ran this morning (in my two-year-old Teva Protons), so won't run again until Sunday AM.  I'll try the RunAmoks then, and report back on my sense of them as running shoes.  They offer a lot of room, great ventilation and good puncture resistance, so I have very high hopes for these as running shoes.