Word: mammalian
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...done. After one type of Australian spider lays her eggs, she lives barely long enough to see her young mature. Then she positions herself among them and slowly liquefies, transforming herself into an edible goo that gives her babies a nutritional kick start in life. The very idea of mammalian metabolism is a subtler case of maternal self-sacrifice. An organism taking in precious calories and then giving them away in the form of milk directly defies the me-first rule of all animal survival, yet mammal mothers do it willingly...
...size antelopes with massive curving horns, carnivores that must have looked like saber-toothed lions, two distinct species of hippo and at least two types of elephant, one of which had tusks that protruded downward from the lower jaw. We may never know the full extent of this incredible mammalian diversity, but there were probably more than twice as many species a million years ago as there are today...
Perhaps most significant, many of the fly genes that turn off during sleep and on when the insects are active proved to be identical to those that regulate mammalian slumber. That means researchers can use flies to test potential drugs and genetic treatments for aiding sleep and preventing drowsiness, rather than putting humans in danger...
...biological earthquake. The experiment he tenaciously pursued--to get a cell from an adult mammal to behave like a cell from a developing embryo--had long since been abandoned at the major centers of scientific research. Even high school biology students knew that once a mammalian cell had differentiated, and was programmed by nature to be bone or nerve or skin, it could not be deprogrammed...
...runner's calves to sprint down Broadway. The lumpy, rubberized-corduroy look has given way to the towering if scaly athleticism pioneered by H.R. Giger's mantid man-eaters in the Alien series. And while the snub-nosed, micro-eared Godzilla of the '60s and '70s had a vaguely mammalian mien--appropriate for a creature whose Japanese name, Gojira, is an amalgam of kujira (whale) and gorira (gorilla)--the fin-de-siecle Godzilla has a crocodilian brow, iguana affectations, a T. Rex crouch and a noble if dragonish chin instead of an avuncular Adam's apple. As for the radioactive...