Word: burrowing
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Modern Jericho is a grubby Jordanian town, 17 miles northeast of Jerusalem, built among the heaped remains of many earlier Jerichos. Archaeologists burrow into the ruins with insatiable delight, and last week Kathleen Kenyon, director of the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem, was completing the excavation of Jericho's first city wall. She believes it was built at least 3,500 years before Joshua and the children of Israel came trumpeting out of the wilderness...
...adult females, which are ordinary-looking flies, lay eggs on wounds or scratches in the hide of cattle; the larvae that hatch burrow into the flesh, sometimes eating the poor beasts alive. Since screw worms breed in wild animals as well as tame ones, they are almost immune to extermination...
...warm and they have mammal-like fur, but they lay soft, reptile-type eggs about ¾ in. long. From the eggs hatch blind, hairless little "larvae" that nurse by licking milk from their mother's mammary pores. Only after several months do they frisk out of their burrow as furry platykittens...
...wooden barrier that separated her from Cecil, the curators happily lifted Cecil over the barrier. Nothing overt was observed, but Penelope was no longer evasive and the two platypuses seemed to get along nicely. When the curators provided her with eucalyptus leaves. Penelope took them into the burrow. Since wild platypuses make their breeding nests out of just such leaves, the curators grew hopeful...
...July 9 Penelope retired to her burrow and did not appear again for six days. She ate an enormous meal and popped back again. The curators hovered around, smiling at one another like fond godfathers. All the signs pointed to platypus eggs, perhaps even hairless platypus infants wriggling in the nest...