Word: extinct
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...Chemist Linus Pauling (all Nobel laureates), Anthropologist Donald Johanson, Astronomers Sir Hermann Bondi and Thomas Gold, Physicist John Wheeler. The conundrums they pose are also notable. How did the universe come into being? Why do we sleep? How are galaxies formed? What is consciousness? Why does a species become extinct? The problem that the experts had simply in formulating these questions is perhaps best expressed by Mathematician C.J.S. Clarke: "It is far from clear just what it is we are ignorant of: despite millennia of attempts, no scientific language yet exists for turning one's vague feeling of mystery...
...that light seems to glance off eyes and feathers. Ripley furnishes all the required taxonomy for experts-and some doleful news for everyone. Because they fly poorly, these birds are easy prey for predators. Their preferred nesting sites-marshes and coastal wetlands-are being drained by progress. Some recently extinct species can now only be seen in places like Rails of the World...
...ESKIMOS were allowed to whale without restrictions, the bowhead might well be extinct within a decade or two. Time-whitened bones and Eskimo legends would be the lonely legacy of the 60-foot-long, 20-ton leviathan. And both the whale and the Eskimo would lose in the long run. On the other hand, a complete ban on bowhead whaling would hasten the erosion of a once vital way of life...
...easy courses proliferate, classes in the harder subjects wither away. Calculus and Russian, two post-Sputnik specialties, are extinct. Only 35 students are braving physics this year. Few kids prefer the nononsense, four-year algebra-geometry-algebra-trigonometry sequence to the simpler math courses. The attrition rate in foreign languages is so great that after the first year, students in higher courses are combined in one class. High-ability kids are not taking high-level courses," says Accounting Teacher James Whitty. The students ask: Why should we?" The school's course brochure advises college-preparatory students that they "should make...
...branch evolved into the ancestors of today's great apes?the gorillas, chimpanzees and orangutans, which are man's closest living cousins. Another produced a creature called Gigantopithecus, a huge ground ape that roamed the valleys of Asia for a few million years before it became extinct. A third branch gave rise to Ramapithecus, which most anthropologists believe was a distant ancestor...