Dam Taxonomy

Got one of those chain emails today with supposed pictures of bighorn sheep wandering precariously along the face of the Buffalo Bill dam in Wyoming.  The pictures are pretty neat, but it was pretty easy to tell some things were amiss.

Here are the pics:









First, the Buffalo Bill dam is a concrete dam.  This dam is a masonry dam made from cut stone, so that automatically excludes this location from being the Buffalo Bill Dam.  Also, the bighorn sheep are ibex, which are native to Eurasia.

A little poking around on the web turned up a recent Snopes article that pretty much confirmed my analysis.  The dam is, in fact, in northern Italy, and the ibex wander it's face licking salt that has leached through the mortar.



Snopes also had links to a few additional web galleries and some other youtube videos, so definitely wander over that way if you want some more info and visuals.