Word: herpetologist
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DIED. Ross Allen, 73, noted herpetologist who in 1929 founded Ross Allen's Reptile Institute, a research center at Silver Springs, Fla., and who survived eleven bites from the lethal likes of rattlesnakes, copperheads and cottonmouth snakes; of cancer; in Gainesville, Fla. A stand-in for Johnny Weissmuller in the Tarzan movies of the 1930s and '40s, Allen was in the final stages of building a million-dollar tourist attraction called Alligator Town, scheduled to open this summer near Lake City...
When Dominique's, a French restaurant in Washington, advertised fresh Pennsylvania rattlesnake sauteed in wine for $9.25, Interior Department Herpetologist C. Kenneth Dodd Jr. whipped off a letter to the beanery urging that the reptile be spared. Pennsylvania's scarce timber rattlesnake is rapidly approaching extinction, he warned. Interior Secretary Cecil Andrus got wind of the letter and promptly fired Dodd, mainly for sending a personal protest on official Government stationery...
There could be an evolution explosion in the wet season," said Herpetologist Michael Tyler. "It could get into billa-bongs [river pools] and replace the native species." Worse still, added John Lake, director of the Northern Territory's Department of Forestry, Fisheries, Wild Life and National Parks, "it would threaten our smaller native species-and that's equivalent to threatening the koala and the platypus...
...Nathan Cohen, a University of California herpetologist, has a different explanation: "This community is like a finger poking in the eye of nature and aggravating it? These young snakes come out of their nests, and they have only one place to go. The watered lawns and garages offer them a cool refuge during the hot summer days...
...John Philip Ionides, 67, the legendary Snake Man of East Africa, whose slithery pets often bit the hand that fed them; of coronary thrombosis; in Nairobi. Sandhurst-trained lonides felt more at home among animals than among men, whom he called "the least interesting of all animals." A devoted herpetologist, he discovered four new species of snakes and hunted down 22 rare species of mammals for the world's zoos and museums. Even after his legs were amputated because of illness, he continued to stalk the bush-in a wheelchair...