Word: apes
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...senators breezily adopted a resolution praising the hairdo of a female legislator, but the house turned aside a proposal to decree ricotta the State Cheese. In Florida, the legislature recently indulged in boisterous repartee over a measure that would have made it a crime to molest the "skunk ape," a mythical critter occasionally sighted around the state that is said to stand 7 ft. tall, weigh 700 lbs. and smell like swamp...
...Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis, as well as a swarm of other young musicians, black and white, singing what was labeled as "black" music. And disc jockey Alan Freed and the record companies looked down upon this phenomenon and realized that white middle-class teenagers went ape over this taboo "black" music that their parents hated. And Freed called it "Rock and Roll," and it was good . . . and profitable...
While these ancient footprints shed fresh light on our nearer ancestors, Anthropologist Elwyn Simons, director of Duke University's primate center, revealed new findings on more distant kin. Most scientists agree that both man and ape descended from a common ancestor, a beast called Dryopithecus (meaning tree ape), which appeared in Africa some 20 million years ago. But who, or what, preceded it? As far back as 1963, Simons, then at Yale, began uncovering in the wind-scoured Fayum desert region, southwest of Cairo, bones of a likely candidate: a small, fox-sized, tree-inhabiting primate, which he dubbed Aegyptopithecus...
When I see God, I don't expect to be in the presence of an ape...
...most difficult task, however, is reconstructing an image of the creature who left these fossils behind. "It's a matter of comparative anatomy," explains Simons. "You study other animals -apes, humans and other primates. Then when you find a piece of bone, you note similarities and differences." The shape of the pelvis tells clearly whether its erstwhile owner walked on all fours or stood erect. Teeth, which are frequently preserved because of their tough, protective enamel, tell even more. Animals that eat meat need teeth shaped to cut and slice; vegetarians need broad molars to chew their fibrous foods...