Word: extinct
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...George, Utah, and when he lost his job there, to Hailey, Idaho. (Nicole declined to comment for this story.) The marriage began to fall apart, and Leyden says he reached a torturous emotional crossroad: he even contemplated striking out to locate remnants of the Order, the near extinct racist commando units smashed by federal authorities more than a decade...
...such scruples, and here are two who certainly don't. John Darnton, chief London correspondent for the New York Times, has entered the arena with a book called Neanderthal (Random House; 368 pages; $24), centered on the large-brained human species that, as far as paleontologists are concerned, became extinct about 27,000 years ago. Simultaneously, screenwriter Petru Popescu has weighed in with Almost Adam (William Morrow; 544 pages; $24), about australopiths, a group of small-brained but upright-walking human precursors whose most recent fossils are more than a million years old. Eschewing time machines and historical settings, both...
Twist any paleontologist's arm and you'll eventually elicit a fantasy about meeting long-extinct animals in the flesh. That's understandable enough, for fossil bones and teeth are frustratingly mute about so many of the things that made them the living organisms they once were. This is never more true than with the fossils of early hominids. But few paleoanthropologists have actually had the nerve to go public with their most imaginative musings, at least partly because they are so conscious of the gulf between what can and cannot reliably be said...
...want reliable information about where our species came from, steer clear of these two books and consult any of the several very readable nonfiction works recently published on the subject. If you want to read a novel that uses a contemporary paleoanthropologist's discovery of thought-to-be-extinct-but-alive-after-all hominids to launch an ingenious and thoughtful exploration of what it means to be human, see if your local library or used-book store still has a copy of Vercors' You Shall Know Them, which was published back in the 1950s. If your tastes run to pulp...
...substance that's essentially dried-up tree resin. The viscous stuff that eventually turns into amber comes from a variety of ancient trees, mostly conifers, including pines and extinct relatives of sequoias and cedars, but also some deciduous trees. It probably evolved, says Grimaldi, as a defense against wood-boring insects. "As it dripped down the bark," he explains, "it acted like flypaper and encapsulated them, hermetically sealing the trees' wounds at the same time...