Word: extinct
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...clear grasp of its purpose. He has said, "Because of the conditions of the world we live in now, we must continue to seek one form of service--military duty--of our young men. We would be an irresponsible nation if we did not--and perhaps even an extinct...
...seat-and James Biddle's boyhood home-is "Andalusia," the most celebrated example of Greek Revival architecture in the U.S. Off and flying, Biddle injected the national conscience into a battle over Hawaii's Diamond Head. Financier Chinn Ho's plan to develop apartments on the extinct volcano's seaward slope sparked an eruption of Hawaiian sentiment against the idea. Said Biddle: "There is a place for high-rise development, but must it be on the slopes of your greatest monument?" Now embattled preservationists have begun to sway the Honolulu city council against the rezoning plan...
Died. James L. B. Smith, 70, ichthyologist who first identified the coelacanth, a fish believed extinct for 70 million years; by his own hand (cyanide); in Grahamstown, South Africa. Until 1938, when a coelacanth was caught off the South African coast, scientists had seen it only in fossil form, a five-foot-long creature whose weird, leglike fins marked it a close relative of the amphibians that first linked sea and land animals. In the years since, a dozen coelacanths have been found, though Smith never realized his dream of studying one alive. His suicide did not surprise his wife...
...dire wolf, the mammoth, the giant beaver, and more than 100 other species of large mammals that once inhabited North America? All that paleontologists know for sure is that about 10,000 years ago, as glaciers retreated northward into Canada during the Late Pleistocene epoch, these animals suddenly became extinct. Their demise, many scientists believe, was caused either by sudden climatic change -which upset their breeding season and produced a lethal sterility-or simply by winter weather, which ironically may have become increasingly severe as the glaciers waned...
...agree that the major climatic changes of the past 50,000 years occurred at approximately the same time throughout the world, the disappearance of species did not. Thus the antlered giraffe disappeared from Africa more than 40,000 years ago, and the rhino-sized Diprotodon and giant kangaroo became extinct in Australia about 14,000 years ago. In Europe and Asia, the woolly rhinoceros and the woolly mammoth ceased to exist between 11,000 and 13,000 years ago, before the species disappeared in North America. Yet on Madagascar, the extinction of giant lemurs and pigmy hippopotamuses did not occur...