Word: mastodon
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...greater achievement was the invention of the first scientifically organized American museum open to the public on a continuous basis. His Peale's Museum in Philadelphia began modestly, with a few stuffed birds, and gradually expanded to include other "wonders" of science, nature and art, from a fossil mastodon to specimens brought back by Lewis and Clark from their trek across the continent, and a gallery of portraits of American heroes as well. He said he wanted "to bring into one view a world in miniature," and that was the gesture he painted himself making in 1822 at the entrance...
...years the writer-director has been devising scenarios of mastodon machismo (Jeremiah Johnson, Magnum Force, Big Wednesday, Apocalypse Now) in which Real Men-guys so tough you could ice-skate on them-attain a state of Zen purity through self-denial, cunning and random slaughter. But these films were like peace pamphlets compared with his latest crimson vision. In Red Dawn he and Co-Author Kevin Reynolds suggest that the U.S. is susceptible to military takeover by parachuting Communist troops; that the Soviets would establish "reeducation camps" in Colorado and show Ivan the Terrible at the local moviehouse; and that...
...bones required a high order of scientific sleuthing. In 1978 one of Webb's students, Diderot Gicca, came up with a jawbone that totally baffled the team. Careful study showed it to be part of a hitherto unknown giant ancestor of the raccoon. Students also found a mastodon, an ancestral kin of the elephant, with two pairs of tusks, the lower ones resembling shovels. For a time, they were also puzzled by what seemed an unusually large (nearly 3 ft.) metacarpal bone. It belonged to a creature called Aepycamelus major, the giraffe camel. No less surprising were the remains...