Word: mammalian
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Like birds, mammals are revealed in the fossil records as descendants of reptiles. As long as 200,000,000 years ago some clumsy reptiles like Cynognathus ("Dog-Jaw") were already showing mammalian quirks around the mouth. By 100,000,000 years ago a few small creatures had probably crossed the mammalian line. Waiting for the gaudy Age of Reptiles to ring down its curtain, the little mammals had promising new equipment-hair for warmth, hot blood for cold weather, milk to feed their young on the move. Their brains grew bigger. When the mighty lizards died out, they were ready...
...soft-eyed young rabbits, all dark grey, hopped nonchalantly about their pen in Harvard's Laboratory of General Physiology last week as many a biologist discussed their twisted pedigree. They were living evidence of what two experimenters had reported as "the first certain demonstration that mammalian eggs can be fertilized in vitro...
...apart, but in point of destructiveness they are bungling amateurs compared with their big-brained relative, man. . . . For untold millions of years the long line of vertebrates that led toward man was of unblushing thieves and robbers. Even now, the human face beneath its smiling mask carries the old mammalian trap set with sharp teeth. ... No wonder we suffer from grafters, gunmen and racketeers. The wonder is, not that so many of us find ourselves in prison, but that any of us have learned to keep out. "As soon as apes began to go in families and hordes . . . unselfishness...
...Ringling called at the White House, casually mentioned to President Coolidge that he had a sea elephant in the show. Mr. Coolidge nodded his head, went to see for himself. He discovered that the sea elephant is just an overgrown species of seal (Mirunga leoninus or patagonica), carnivorous, mammalian, with a flexible proboscis, hind limbs so rudimentary that they look like a big tail; broad, flat for ward flippers for swimming and spanking the young. For Mr. Coolidge's pleasure Goliath I devoured 50 Ib. of herring. Six months later a shark got into his enclosure off Sarasota...
...What is a sea elephant? President Coolidge knew all about the land elephant, which is the symbol of his political party: the largest of land animals, herbivorous, mammalian, ungulate, with a flexible proboscis, exaggerated incisors (tusks), rudimentary tail. But what is a sea elephant; mammal or fish? President Coolidge said he did not know and when John Ringling, who was in Washington with his circus, called at the White House and said his sea elephant weighed four tons. President Coolidge went to see for himself. Mrs. Coolidge, in summery white hat, suit and gloves, went too. They took seven-year...