Word: moderns
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...could keep their vast bodies alive without a great deal of food. In their age, he thinks, the earth's atmosphere did not contain so much oxygen as it does today. The dominant plants were mostly gymnosperms (conifers, ginkgoes, etc.) that did not excrete so much oxygen as modern plants...
Burnout. The dinosaurs evolved in this oxygen-poor atmosphere and were adjusted to it, but when the angiosperms (modern broad-leaved plants and grasses) became dominant, the dinosaurs were headed for trouble. The vigorous angiosperms excreted so much oxygen that they changed the atmosphere. The oxygen-rich air increased the metabolism of the dinosaurs. They were compelled to live at a faster rate, and they could not gather the vast amounts of food their speeded-up bodies called for. So they burned out and died out, while the newly evolved mammals, well-adapted to oxygen-rich air, took over...
...great dinosaurs of 100 million years ago probably reproduced slowly, as big modern animals do. So the Soviet scientists suggest that a few centuries of intense cosmic rays from an exploding star may have killed them off. Small, fast-breeding animals, such as the primitive, ratlike mammals of the time, would not be damaged as much. So the mammals survived the siege of cosmic rays. After the supernova had died down, some evolved into forms almost as big as the dinosaurs...
Today, amid new awareness that gardens form an integral part of architecture, the influence of Japanese garden design is growing. The 1954 exhibition of a Japanese house and garden at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art still holds the record as the museum's most heavily attended architectural show. Last week the same display was being reconstructed in Philadelphia's Fairmount Park. Books on Japanese gardens (most recent: Gardens of Japan by the late Tetsuro Yoshida, famed Japanese architect) have become a must for the modern architect's library. After 14 centuries the art form started...
...hotels, sell life insurance. Wherever Getty happens to be, there is centered the world of Getty Oil and its satellites. In an age of teamwork, J. Paul Getty is the last of a vanishing breed: an autocratic tycoon who runs his own show, has nothing but contempt for the modern, hemmed-in executive and the committee concept of running a business. "Most of the people in the top management of American business," says Lone Wolf Getty, "are promoted clerks, engineers and salesmen. I like Benjamin Franklin's advice: if you want it done correctly, do it yourself...