Word: extinct
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...From four African civet cats, 14 have been shipped off and nine kept for further breeding. The zoo's most expensive inmate, a $12,000 male lowland gorilla, fathered one infant in July, and has impregnated a second female. The most notable success is the whiteeared pheasant, possibly extinct in the wild. The zoo has bred 51 of them and exported ten pairs to seven countries...
Durrell is horrified by this irony and notes that the last passenger pigeon on earth died in 1914−in a zoo. He has chosen the extinct dodo as SAFE'S emblem, and sports a button reading "Dodo Power," in the hope of dramatizing the urgency of the situation: the flightless bird was extinct only 186 years after Europeans landed on its home island of Mauritius. "The dodo was part of a delicate spider web that connects us all," says Durrell. "Every time you muck about with that web, it sends tremors all the way through...
...strange in the limestone debris-an ivory-colored, banana-shaped object that looked like a miniature elephant tusk. Bank officials, hearing of the odd discovery, quickly called in an amateur archaeologist, Robert Ferguson, who immediately recognized the find. It was a fossilized fang from a saber-toothed tiger, an extinct, ferocious-looking creature that once stalked wide areas of the Americas...
...around it. The bank's gesture quickly paid dividends. A team of amateur diggers, led by Ferguson and Anthropologist Ronald Spores of Vanderbilt University, found the bulk of the remaining pieces of the tiger's skeleton as well as more fossils, including the bones of several other extinct creatures apparently killed and dragged into the cavern by the tiger: a mastodon, an ancient horse, a long-nosed piglike creature called a peccary and a prehistoric bison. In addition, they discovered four relatively recent human remains-probably Indians of the Woodland Period (1000 B.C.-1500 A.D.). Distinguished...
...assistant navigator, and brought back bird, plant and fish specimens never before seen in the U.S. Among the discoveries of his 61-year career were the skeleton of the New Zealand moa, a flightless bird of centuries ago, and the cahow, a sea bird believed to have been extinct since the 17th century. As bird curator at Manhattan's American Museum of Natural History, he sailed on more than a dozen ocean expeditions, wrote nearly 600 articles and ten books (among them, Logbook for Grace, Oceanic Birds of South America), had two mountains and several creatures named after...