Incredible moment a wild badger buries an entire COW carcass in a world first.This is the first time that this behavior has been recorded in American badgers. Badgers were known to bury small mammals but never something so big. The time lapse video shows the animals as it buried the cow over five days. Badgers bury their food to keep fresh for later meals - A badger has been filmed burying an entire cow carcass for the first time.

While badgers are known to bury other items, including food stashes, nobody knew that they would, or even could, bury an animal carcass four times their size. The amazing footage was captured by researchers in the Grassy Mountains of Utah.

While studying scavenger behavior in Utah's Great Basin Desert, University of Utah biologists observed an American badger bury a cow carcass alone. This is the first known instance of a badger burying an animal larger than itself.

The finding suggests that badgers may have no limit to the size of animal they can cache. They may therefore play an important role in sequestering large carcasses, which could benefit cattle ranchers in the West.

'We know a lot about badgers morphologically and genetically, but behaviorally there's a lot of blank spaces that need to be filled,' says Ethan Frehner, lead author on the paper documenting the behavior.

In January 2016, co-author Evan Buechley set out seven calf carcasses in Utah's Grassy Mountains, west of Salt Lake City.

Each carcass was staked down and equipped with a camera trap to document what scavengers visited which carcasses.

Mr Buechley, who studies vultures and other avian scavengers, hoped to learn more about the ecology of scavengers in the Great Basin during the winter.

Mr Buechley went out to check on the carcasses after a week, and found that one was missing.

'When I first got there I was bummed because it's hard to get these carcasses, to haul them out and set them up,' he said. 'I thought "Oh, well we've lost one after a week."'

He searched around the area, thinking that perhaps a coyote or mountain lion had dragged the carcass away, but after finding nothing, returned to the site and realized the ground where the carcass had been was disturbed.

'Right on the spot I downloaded the photos,' he said. 'We didn't go out to study badgers specifically, but the badger declared itself to us.'

Little was previously known about badger behavior, Mr Frehner says.

'They're an enigmatic species. A substantial amount of their lifetime is spent either underground or a lot of nocturnal behavior, so it's hard to directly observe that.' In the photos, Mr Buechley saw the badger dig around and beneath the carcass, which disappeared into the cavity created by the excavation.

'Watching badgers undertake this massive excavation around and underneath is impressive,' Mr Frehner says. 'It's a lot of excavation engineering they put into accomplishing this.'

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