Word: caving
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When Colonel John Stuart found some fossils in a Virginia cave, he naturally sent them to Monticello where Jefferson was known to include old bones among his strange (and, folk said, atheistic) interests. In 1797 Jefferson described the fossil creature before the American Philosophical Society (of which he was then president) as a kind of enormous lion because of its eight-inch claws. Wrote he: "I cannot . .. help believing that this animal, as well as the mammoth, are still existing." When Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark up the Missouri River and Captain Zebulon Pike into the Rockies, he half-hoped...
This was not completely silly. Megalonyx jeffersoni is so recent that its bones sometimes bear wisps of hair. Paleontologist Patterson thinks that cave men helped to exterminate the creatures though "an embrace from a sloth would have made a bear's hug look like child's play." In expecting to bag a Megalonyx, Jefferson was not "wrong by more than a few thousand years." As bone-diggers measure time, this was only day before yesterday...
...scientist had a skull strikingly like that of the Aurignacian man-a cave man of the late...
Near Bardia, a handful of fugitive Italians disappeared into a coastal cave. A British sergeant called a colonel from his swim, and while the colonel, clad only in his slippers, stood guard with revolver at the entrance, the sergeant wriggled into the cave, shooting. Out crawled the Italians, among them Francesco Argentina, erstwhile commander of Sidi Barrani, eleventh Italian general to be captured in the British attack on Libya. For three days the general went on a hunger strike, then ate, wailed: "For all I care about this desert, you can have it! I myself am a poet...
...from the north. That afternoon 15,000 of the Italians were in British hands, the rest "confined to a restricted area." The Rome radio warned the Italian people that Bardia was about to fall. The Italians no longer stood by their positions. Three thousand were taken out of one cave. Neither side's casualties were heavy...