Word: sabers
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Reagan knows that true peace in this age must rest on America's economic and military strength, and he is working to shore up both. There has been some careless war talk by the President's men and maybe a little too much saber rattling in the Caribbean and the Middle East. Yet even that has had some beneficial side effects. The President seems to have knocked the Soviets off balance a bit. If the history of the past 25 years tells us anything it is that when the Soviets are a little scared they complain bitterly...
Pretty or not, that kind of romance has kept the California condor around since saber-toothed tigers roamed the Sierra Nevada. Whether the bird will continue to survive, however, has been in serious doubt since the last century. As North America's largest land bird, the condor has always made a seductively easy target. Indians prized its tough, 2-ft.-long feathers; 19th century hobbyists collected condor eggs, which could fetch $300. During the 1849 gold rush, its hollow quill feathers, waterproof and ½ in. in diameter, were favored as gold-dust containers. Even after the condor became...
...addition to the remains of birds, fish, turtles and crocodiles, Webb's workers found seven species of tiny extinct horses. These are among many mammals, including the saber-toothed tiger, that mysteriously disappeared from' the Western Hemisphere at the end of the last ice age, about 10,000 years ago. Equines were not seen again in the New World until the Spanish reintroduced them in the 16th century. Yet other species located in the Love pit are still alive and well, even if not in Florida. The diggers, for example, identified the remains of tapirs, piglike animals that...
...excavation, Webb and his students have dug up-from what has been dubbed the Love Bone Bed-bits and pieces of more than 100 species of animals, many of them long extinct. All date back to the late Miocene epoch, about 9 million years ago. Among the finds: saber-toothed tigers, four-tusked mastodons, a giant camel some 18 ft. high, an extinct raccoon as big as a bear, various ancient horses and dogs -and the Carcharodon megalodon, a relative of the great white shark. As Ron Love puts it, "They had one hell of a zoo here...
...digging and shooting have paid off handsomely. Webb considers the Love pit one of the richest U.S. fossil finds in years, unequaled anywhere in the Southeast. Some specimens turned up in almost wholesale quantities. His team, for example, dug up so many saber-toothed tiger bones that they may help shed a totally new light on the ferocious-looking cats. Some were so young they still had baby teeth, others were 25 to 30 years old. (In appreciation of the Loves, researchers even named one new sabertooth species after them: Barbourofelis lovei...