As we love to point out , Mother Nature's favorite gag is giving vicious predators the bodies of harmless fuzzballs. As part of our duty to make sure you don't judge an animal's lethality by its appearance, we'd like to remind you that ...

6 Roadrunners Eat Rattlesnakes

Via Turtletrack.org

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When someone mentions roadrunners, you probably think of a tall, skinny bird that runs really fast, goes "Meep meep" and routinely outwits cartoon coyotes. And while Warner Bros. did get some things right (the birds are capable of flight, but choose to just run around really fast), cartoons are rarely accurate sources for the aspiring ornithologist.

Via Wikimedia Commons

Top speed: 17 mph.

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Real roadrunners are smaller (upward of 2 feet long from beak to tail) than their cartoon counterparts, and they're far more likely to be doing the murdering than running from it.

Wait, What?

Roadrunners are almost exclusively carnivorous. The diet they follow is not the wimpy "small furry things" sort, either. Try rattlesnakes.



A snake lunging at a roadrunner's face is the same as you punching at a mugger's gun.

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The roadrunner just sinks its beak into the snake (or whatever abomination it happens to be facing), promptly lifts it high into the air and repeatedly smashes it into the ground until it is tenderized enough to swallow whole. This technique, according to scientists, "subjects the prey to an outward force away from the center of rotation, in this case, the center of rotation being the roadrunner's face." More importantly, it does it like a boss.

That there, friends, is a goddamn finishing move. It even has a name: the Centrifugal Slam.

Oh, and the roadrunner also eats other birds. It doesn't even fly after them -- instead, it just jumps in the air and snatches them as they pass. And then: the Centrifugal Slam.