AIR Limerick Contest: Grauballe Man's Intestines

The Annals of Improbable Research is (er, are?) must reading for the scientist who spends too much time in her laboratory. The humor magazine is in its 14th year of publication, and provides an ongoing giggle or two to the most stuffy of us.

For example, every month AIR host a limerick contest. To enter, you must compose a limerick based on a piece of scientific research, occasionally on archaeology, by golly. An earlier limerick contest on the Taung Child resulted in an array of entries that I posted here.

This month's limerick contest entries are to be on the intestines of the bog body known as Grauballe man, as described in a report in the Journal of Archaeological Science by University of Aarhus MRI researcher Hans Stødkilde-Jørgensen and colleagues.

Here's your chance to do something truly unimportant for science.

The following is a direct quote from the Mini-AIR newsletter of April 18th, 2008, reprinted by permission:

Peat-Bog Man's Intestines Competition

"The Intestines of a More Than 2000 Years Old Peat-Bog Man: Microscopy, Magnetic Resonance Imaging and 14C-dating," Hans Stødkilde-Jørgensen, Niels Otto Jacobsen, Esbern Warncke and Jan Heinemeier, Journal of Archaeological Science, vol. 35, no. 3, March 2008, pp. 530-4.

The authors, at Aarhus University, report: "The intestines of Grauballe Man, who is a 2400-old late Iron Age body found in a raised bog in the central part of Jutland, Denmark, was examined by microscopy and magnetic resonance imaging. Plant roots found in the tissue were radiocarbon dated by AMS.... The low signal spots observed by MRI turned out to be formed by plant roots penetrating the tissue. AMS 14C-dating of these indicated that penetration appeared not more than 200 years after the body was laid in the bog."

RULES: Please make sure your rhymes actually do, and that your poem is in classic, trips-off-the-tongue limerick form.

PRIZE: The winning poet will receive (if we manage to send it to the correct address) a free, possibly peaty issue of the Annals of Improbable Research. Send entries (one entry per entrant) to:

PEAT-BOG MAN'S INTESTINE LIMERICK COMPETITION c/o marca AT chem2.harvard.edu (replace AT with the @)

More on AIR and Grauballe Man

• Annals of Improbable Research (now open access! Woohoo!)
• AIR's Taung Child Load Limerick Competition
• Grauballe Man