Word: extincted
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...whole groups of things that are as unique as, say, whales are." Two years ago, Nissen and geologist Elizabeth Price discovered a plentiful site on ground that teams had walked over a hundred times previously: a bushfire had cleared away the grass to unveil an ancient graveyard for various extinct species. "At Riversleigh," says Archer's wife, project coprincipal Sue Hand, "there are always these episodes of serendipity...
...team is patient with neophytes fascinated by Riversleigh's extinct megafauna (though many of these creatures were known already from deposits elsewhere in Australia), among them the rhinoceros-sized Diprotodon optatum, distantly related to the wombat; and the 3-m tall, 400-kg flightless bird Dromornis stirtoni, which had a beak large and sharp enough to tear the flesh off a kangaroo, if not as a predator then as a scavenger. Extracting the fossils of such creatures is harder than finding them. These palaeontologists aren't eggheads: they spend seven hours each day under a scorching sun levering boulders...
...dwindled from a peak of 122 in the late 1980s to a mere 17. By early spring, the number of unionized security guards fell to seven, and on June 30, when they will trade in their Harvard uniforms for company garb from Allied Security, their breed will be completely extinct...
...which scavenges by night, cleaning the bush and farmlands of dead and dying animals, then retreating with daylight to dens among the ferns and heath. But the animal settlers once feared is now one of Tasmania?s favorite symbols, adorning souvenir key rings and sports-club logos. Unlike the extinct thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger, devils survived decades of now-banned hunting, and are still considered common. But perhaps not for long. A grotesque disease is striking devils down, just as a new predator readies itself to seize their place at the top of Tasmania?s ecological pecking order...
...Species that could be extinct by 2050 if global-warming trends continue...