Word: opossums
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Prokosch doubtless meant to write "opossum," doubtless did not think...
...down the evolutionary scale of mammals are the marsupials (pouch-bearers). The Western Hemisphere's only pouch-bearer, the opossum, is the lowest marsupial of all. Its young, born after a gestation of about 13 days, are only one-half inch long at birth, without fully-developed hind legs, sans eyes, sans ears or reflexes. A litter of 18 weighs about 1/15 oz., fits easily into an ordinary teaspoon (see cut). Because the opossum is born at such an early stage in its development it makes glad the hearts of embryologists...
...years ago Philadelphia's Wistar Institute of Anatomy and Biology managed to raise a few opossums in captivity. This year 285 young were born on its farm. From his study of these. Edward McCrady Jr. last week published a monograph on The Embryology of the Opossum, which brought to an end one controversy, may well start a few more...
Long accepted by embryologists has been a theory that the marsupial mother tucks her newborn into the pouch with her lips. When, at various times, scientists reported cases of kangaroo and opossum babies crawling up their mothers' inclined bodies into the incubating pouches by themselves, most of their colleagues raised an eyebrow. The fetuses, they said, were too immature for such mountaineering...
...frog farm and an opossum farm on which the birth of young opossums, less than a half-inch long, is about to be recorded in motion pictures...