Word: extinct
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...outcome, it may be too late to save the tigers. They once rambled across most of Asia, from Siberia in the north to Indonesia in the south to Turkey in the west. Now they are confined to small, shrinking pockets of their forest habitat. The Caspian subspecies became extinct more than a decade ago. So did the Balinese and Javan cats. The survivors are impossible to count with any precision, but fewer than 650 Sumatran tigers remain and maybe 200 of Siberia's Amur, the world's largest cat. China has a few dozen left, and these isolated individuals will...
...Harvard has no place for national fraternities and I am sure that those which have become extinct have never been missed by the college," Theta Delta Chi brother Paul M. Rice '15 wrote years later...
...when two more Neanderthal skeletons were discovered in a cave in the Spy region of Belgium. While Virchow claimed that these too were the remains of diseased modern humans, other scientists regarded such a coincidence as unlikely; they were more impressed by primitive tools and the remnants of extinct animals found near the skeletons. The Neanderthals, they agreed, were ancient. Still, they insisted that, Darwin's controversial new theory notwithstanding, the strange creatures could not possibly be ancestral to exalted human beings like themselves...
...Neanderthals, the relationship between them and modern humans is still a topic for hot debate. Some textbooks classify Neanderthals as a subspecies within Homo sapiens; others list a separate species, Homo neanderthalensis. British paleontologist Christopher Stringer is convinced that Neanderthals evolved in Europe from Homo erectus and suddenly became extinct between 35,000 and 30,000 years ago, unable to compete effectively with Homo sapiens originating in Africa. "In my view," he says, "they are a dead end -- highly evolved in their own direction but not in the direction of modern humans...
Among the experts who agree is Yoel Rak, an anatomist at Tel Aviv University. He believes "Neanderthals have nothing to do with our history." They may well have become extinct, he says, because they were too highly specialized -- probably well adapted to survive the frigid temperatures of Ice Age Europe. But when such conditions change, he notes, "the highly specialized creatures are at a tremendous disadvantage...