Word: platypuses
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...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 branch of mammals to the two that had previously been identified: one resulted in the egg-laying platypus and the spiny anteater of today; the other led to all modern animals that produce live young. The new branch may have been a zoological dead end, but its discovery illustrates the extraordinary precariousness and complexity of the evolutionary process...
...seems more like a rural school master. There is a comfortable, unstudied eclecticism about him. His checkered trousers, striped shirt and plaid jacket have an odd camouflaging effect, especially when he stands against a large glass case containing a Victorian bouquet of stuffed pheasants, birds of paradise and a platypus. He offers no sharp opinions, no bulletins on the state of the arts...
...still fires an occasional witty missive to the paper under the name of some long-dead relative. Though she retired from the Times board in 1973, Iphigene Sulzberger remains a formidable force in the family. She designed its coat of arms, which features a duck-billed platypus-"an egg-laying mammal that suckles its young," explains Punch-and the motto NOTHING is IMPOSSIBLE. Not for her, anyway. She traveled to China several years ago with a granddaughter and playfully invited Chou En-lai to write for the Times; he declined. The matriarch rarely interferes in Arthur's affairs. "Sons...
...blood-stained silver money, a socialist German-language newspaper and start the Spanish-American War has New York faced such a challenge from the West. Things fall apart. Now what rough beast with the legs of a kangaroo, the body of a killer bee, and the shrewdness of a platypus slouches towards Gotham to be born...
...platypus population was severely threatened in the 1920s, Temple-Smith says, when poachers after the furs had hunted them down. Now, he says, streams as small as one meter across yield platypuses. "Even in dams and ponds with no streams feeding into them you find platypus in them," he says. (He avoids the difficult choice between platypuses and platypi by simply saying platypus for the plural.) But Temple-Smith says he does not know how much more work he will do on platypuses; "the field work is not easy to do." In almost all of the cases of people trying...