Word: fauna
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...World naturalists believed that the newly discovered land to the west was inhabited by spiders the size of cats, beasts more cunning than anything in mythology, and plants capable of curing most of the ills that befell man. The field naturalists who began studying North American flora and fauna in the 18th century proved that the realities were in some ways as unbelievable as the fantasies. The amateur collectors and skilled scientists fanned out into the New World gathering animals, insects and plants by the bushelful. By the end of the 19th century, they had succeeded in writing not merely...
...impossible. Even Adams' fervent admirers admit that he can be spotty: at best an artful cataloguer of flora and fauna, at worst a windy sentimentalist. Memorable passages occur only when his imagination roosts among furry creatures or in the mid-regions of myth. Give him anything more difficult to chew on than a bone, and things fall apart. The story of Rowf and Snitter is glutted with just such indigestibles...
...weather, how pollution is gradually depleting valuable fisheries and destroying salt marshes where sea birds breed. Its last important section is a series on the world's major ocean areas, tracking origins of the warm Mediterranean Sea and the frigid Arctic Ocean, assaying values of flora, fauna and inanimate components of the marine world, outlining what must be done to preserve and protect them...
...chimera, the griffin, the manticore and the sphinx are familiar fauna that flourish outside traditional biology. Now it appears that unfamiliar flora grow outside of conventional botany. Or so says the protean Leo Lionni, 67, teacher, painter, sculptor, former art director of FORTUNE and author of a dozen delightful children's books. To illustrate, Lionni has literalized Marianne Moore's "imaginary gardens with real toads in them"-and then removed the toads. What remains is a series of never-were "parallel plants," a vegetable kingdom with members rooted beyond the fences of nature and logic...
...potential broader social or ethical implications of initiating this line of research--of its role, as a possible prelude to longer-range, broader-scale genetic engineering of the fauna and flora of the planet including ultimately, man...Shall we take into our hands our own future evolution...