Word: mammals
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...Once in a funny, odd-shaped house/ There lived a wee maid and a mouse./ The mouse was fat, the maid was thin./ The house was new-they'd just moved in." So begins the shaggy-mammal story The Maid and the Mouse and the Odd-shaped House (Dodd, Mead; $9.95). Told in rhyme as infectious as the prescriptions of Dr.Seuss, the tale comes complete with the kind of conclusion that dissolves children in laughter at every telling. The house, it turns out, is more than odd-shaped, it is cat-shaped, complete with legs, whiskers and a roar...
...shouting and spending, the shows and services are lavished on an extraordinary mammal. Weighing in at an average of 10 Ibs., the cat has a uniquely flexible backbone. When dropped from a height of less than one foot in an upside-down position, it will land on its paws in an incredible 1.8 sec. Its whiskers transmit complex information about its prey and surroundings to nerve bundles beneath the skin. According to one parapsychologist, the cat may even harbor a trace of E.S.P. A feline named Pooh, for example, who wandered off before the owners moved some 200 miles from...
Last week, as if to reinforce Dougal Dixon's point, a team led by Harvard Paleontologist Parish Jenkins Jr. announced a rare discovery from northeastern Arizona: a fossil jaw from a tiny, shrewlike, insect-eating mammal that lived during the early Jurassic period, 180 million years ago. At that time the first small mammals evolved from a kind of mammalian reptile. In evolutionary terms, these creatures bided their time, for 115 million years, until the disappearance of dinosaurs and other reptiles allowed them to evolve thousands of different shapes and sizes. Significantly, the Arizona find adds a third major...
...Harvard professor of Biology announced last week that an expedition he led during the summer had found the fossil remains of what is now thought to be the oldest mammal specimen in North America, Farish A. Jenkins Jr., who is also curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Museum of Comparative Zoology, said the jaw-bone fossil belongs to a mouse-sized creature that lived about 180 million years ago. "This is the most exciting find of my career because it stimulates our research of the earliest stages of mammalian history," Jenkins said in announcing the discovery...
During a 1974 expedition to the Badlands of Montana, Jenkins discovered a nearly complete fossil skeleton then believed to be the oldest mammal specimen in North America...