Word: zealander
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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NORFOLK, Va., Oct. 29--The Harvard-bound ketch Miru left here late today on the last leg of its 10,000 mile journey from New Zealand to Boston...
...will soon have live reptiles that were already old-fashioned when the dinosaurs were still young. Tuataras (Sphenodon punctatus), which look like 2½-ft. lizards but are far more primitive, were plentiful round the world 200 million years ago. Now, almost unchanged, they are found only in New Zealand, that ultimate storehouse for discontinued zoological models...
When white men came to New Zealand, there were tuataras all over the place, but man's pets and camp followers (dogs, cats, rats, etc.) almost wiped them out. Only on a few small islands did they survive. Even there the cats harried them until the New Zealand government curbed the cats. Then the tuataras multiplied and they are now just plentiful enough to be shared with a few foreign zoos...
Curator Oliver would like to breed tuataras in the Bronx Zoo, but they have no external sexual characteristics. The only way to distinguish males from females is to wait for the mating season, when the tuataras, croaking, make their own decisions. New Zealand is not yet ready to release enough tuataras for this auto-selection experiment...
...Name of a Pacific defense union (consisting of Australia, New Zealand...