Word: extincted
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Only moments ago in biological time, the earth abounded with a myriad of mammals, reptiles and fish that ran afoul of the iron laws of evolution and natural disaster, and are now extinct. But the most devastating killer has been man. Since 1600, when the first precise records were compiled, man has butchered creatures ranging from the abalone to the blue whale and the zebra. "During the past 150 years," says Ecologist Lee M. Talbot of the Smithsonian Institution, "the rate of extermination of mammals has increased 55-fold. If the killing goes on at this pace, in about...
Egged on by all the activity, one Carr Mill lad has compiled a list of 60 puns containing the word egg (eggsperiment, eggshausted, eggcetera). Others are learning egg statistics (record number of eggs eaten at one sitting: 47) and making a large model of the egg of the extinct elephant bird. Says Headmaster Appleton: "In this school, it is eggs with everything...
...sideshow, the minor Durrell delights are there. Who else would write, "The cinema is the No play of the Yes-Man"? And where else, in the year 1970, is there a novelist inclined to describe the aftereffects of a concussion as "darkness hanging like a Japanese print of an extinct volcano...
Bats are descended from an extinct species of Insectivora. But because of their dexterous hands and feet they were grouped with the Primates by early taxonomists. The unsettling resemblance of bats to humans is readily apparent in many of the book's pictures. Such resemblances have overheated imaginations for centuries. Gargoyles, those batlike grotesqueries designed to draw off water and scare the devil from cathedrals in the Middle Ages, were undoubtedly inspired by ths real things that hung timidly in medieval spires...
...vanishing Americana is cause for nostalgia. Consider the speed trap, that once ubiquitous feature of Crossroads, U.S.A., now largely and mercifully extinct, the victim of interstate highways and perhaps even some slight evolution in civic if not human nature. One malignant exception to progress, however, is the southeastern Georgia town of Ludowici. Named after an immigrant German roofing-tile manufacturer who built a factory there at the turn of the century, it is one of the last remaining speed traps in the country. TIME Correspondent Joseph Kane drove slowly into Ludowici and sent back this report...