Word: fauna
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...winter morning, Will's mother and father inform him that his favorite fauna, the woolly mammoth, is extinct. But the boy knows better. Squinting his eyes, he manages to conjure up the prehistoric past, complete with saber- toothed tigers, early versions of horses, warthogs and, of course, the elephant's tusky ancestor. In Will's Mammoth (Putnam; $14.95), Stephen Gammell augments Rafe Martin's whimsical text with celebrations of early mammals, snow and that greatest of all time machines, a child's imagination...
Wilkes said ethical questions also contributed to Zaire's cool reception of the plan, citing the difficulty of preserving the fauna of the area without threatening the subsistence of its population...
...more than just good material for TV specials. The rain forest is a virtually untapped storehouse of evolutionary achievement that will prove increasingly valuable to mankind as it yields its secrets. Agronomists see the forest as a cornucopia of undiscovered food sources, and chemists scour the flora and fauna for compounds with seemingly magical properties. For instance, the piquia tree produces a compound that appears to be toxic to leaf-cutter ants, which cause millions of dollars of damage each year to South American agriculture. Such chemicals promise attractive alternatives to dangerous synthetic pesticides. Other jungle chemicals have already...
LitGaz not only stood by the story but also took its case directly to a jury of sausage savants at the Fauna Cat Lovers Club in Dzerzhinsky, where the editors conducted a random taste test with some finicky felines. Last week, in an article titled "May the Cats Judge Us," the paper reported the results of its poll: out of 30 cats, only a two-month-old kitten named Mura would deign to dine on the suspect sausage. Asked the Gazeta: "All kitties, like Mura, must loyally love sausage. That's the way it's always been since man thought...
...about the survival of tropical species never seen outside a rain forest? Yes, they should. Variety is the spice of life, goes the saying. Biologists would go further and argue that variety is the very stuff of life. Life needs diversity because of the interdependencies that link flora and fauna, and because variation within species allows them to adapt to environmental challenges. But even as the world's human population explodes, other life is ebbing from the planet. Humanity is making a risky wager -- that it does not need the great variety of earth's species to survive...