Word: platypus
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...have disappeared when the seas began to be thronged with more modern, more efficient rivals. A plausible theory is that the Coelacanths retreated to the deeps where competition was not severe, and persisted there as the archaic okapi survived in the dense Congo forests, as the primitive duck-billed platypus in benign Australia. If so, some whim or freak of circumstance brought this particular Coelacanth up from the deeps to the coastal water of South Africa. And the possibility remains that other "living fossils" may lurk in the ocean depths, awaiting the scrutiny of science if science is ingenious enough...
...hobbies to satisfy half-a-dozen ordinary men. His enormous library contains large sections on Africa, astronomy, bird life, reptiles, fungi, biography and geology. Books litter all his rooms, and jammed in every corner of Dr. Kelly's house are snakeskins, turtle shells, stuffed birds, a duck-billed platypus, buffalo legs. Up to a few years ago Dr. Kelly kept a zoo of 20-odd live snakes in a chamber...
...wearing a gargantuan pink ballet skirt edged with pompons, roaring out feminine lines in full bass. So thoroughly did he delight the fun-loving citizens of Sydney, they gave him an indigenous and characteristic present: a robe made from 80 pelts of the weird duckbill, or platypus. There seems to have been none like it before or since...
Though still to be found in its exclusively Australian habitat, the duckbill is nonextant as a foreign captive. In 1922, after spending nine years and $1,400, New York Zoological Park's deliberate William Reid Blair carried to The Bronx the only live platypus ever to leave Australia. It. tried for 49 days to adapt itself to an elaborate man-made labyrinth. Then it died, was stuffed and taken to the Newark. N. J. museum...
George Fortescue rolled up his platypus robe, slipped it into a trunk, carried it on his travels until his death in 1914. It then went to his daughter Viola, who paid even less attention to it than he had. Recently, friends urged her to find out its worth. She took it to Revillon Fréres, smart Manhattan furriers, who this week began exhibiting the piece for Fifth Avenue window-gazers. Unofficial appraisal: intrinsic value-under $10; possible rarity value...