Word: lands
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...when it comes to saving wild animals, what really sets Rabinowitz apart is his patience. Like a roving international diplomat, the wildlife biologist has tirelessly lobbied foreign governments to set aside land to protect endangered species - especially big cats like jaguars, mountain lions and tigers, whose numbers in the wild dwindle every year. Starting in Belize in 1984, when he talked the government into creating the world's first ever jaguar preserve, Rabinowitz has emerged as the global spokesman for big cats, a scientist willing to talk to anyone, at any time, in the service of animals. His mentor...
...footsteps, Rabinowitz has focused on protecting cats partially for public relations reasons - it's easier to rally public support behind such beautiful, charismatic animals than, say, a new species of frog. Also, because big cats range far and wide in their habitats, if you can stake out enough land to protect them, you'll also be protecting all the smaller animals that occupy the lower rungs of the food chain. (It's called the "apex protection" strategy.) Tigers will likely always remain endangered in the Hukawng Valley, but turning the area into a well-protected reserve would safeguard...
...Rabinowitz didn't stand in the way of some economic development in the valley, realizing that sustained poverty would only exacerbate the threat to the tigers. It's a delicate balance always in risk of being overturned, but while the reserve remains in harmony, the benefits to an uneasy land like Burma are enormous. "Animals and conservation can do more to bring together disparate cultures, ideologies, and social classes than any political oratory, pounding of fists or aggressive actions by individuals or between nations," Rabinowitz writes. Today the reserve is virtually complete, and he hopes that over time tiger numbers...
...massive epidemic; rather, the constant wear and tear of illness weakened the dinosaurs so that other catastrophes, like comets and volcanoes, could have finished them off. Still, the Poinars couldn't resist a bit of made-for-Hollywood drama. One great quote from the book: "The largest of the land animals, the dinosaurs, would have been locked in a life-or-death struggle with [insects] for survival...
...Oceanography, along with several colleagues, got their information by analyzing the amount of the isotope oxygen-18 in foraminifera, tiny, shelled sea dwellers that thrived at the time. It turns out that when water evaporates from the sea but doesn't return (implying that it's trapped up on land somewhere, frozen), the ratio of oxygen-18 to oxygen-16 in seawater changes (O-18 is heavier, so it evaporates less). The foraminifera aren't picky; they just incorporate oxygen into their shells, in whichever form...