Word: flightless
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...team is patient with neophytes fascinated by Riversleigh's extinct megafauna (though many of these creatures were known already from deposits elsewhere in Australia), among them the rhinoceros-sized Diprotodon optatum, distantly related to the wombat; and the 3-m tall, 400-kg flightless bird Dromornis stirtoni, which had a beak large and sharp enough to tear the flesh off a kangaroo, if not as a predator then as a scavenger. Extracting the fossils of such creatures is harder than finding them. These palaeontologists aren't eggheads: they spend seven hours each day under a scorching sun levering boulders...
...These are also the best times to see Australia's most famous fauna up close and personal. Giant gray kangaroos feed in the clearings, and emus?those large, ungainly, flightless birds endemic Down Under?stride comically along the corrugated dirt road that loops the Pinnacles Desert. Though now protected in the area, the birds were in the past a source of food for Aboriginal tribes. Artifacts at least 6,000 years old have been uncovered here, leading geologists to assume that the area was once inhabited. Entry into the park is just $4 a person; accommodation and tours...
...science major. While a student at Amherst, however, he wrote a thesis on land use and stumbled across a book on biological invasions of pristine places. A native of Hawaii, he knew that this problem was especially acute in his home state. All of Hawaii's 20 species of flightless birds have vanished, and half the flying ones as well. One-sixth of the native plants are gone, and 30% of remaining ones are threatened. "I decided I wanted to be an ecologist, so I jumped into science classes to catch up," he says. "I always intended to work...
...While the Mets cut the Giants down to size and made the Cardinals look like flightless birds, the Yankees were positively moribund in September and finished the season by losing seven in a row. They have righted themselves somewhat in these playoffs, but a team that lost a total of two games in their last two playoff runs has already lost four in this one. The pitching (excepting Rivera) is weaker, the hitting still waking up. Not until the seventh-inning explosion that clinched the ALCS in Game Six did the Yankee bats begin to remind me of old times...
...viewers as young Saffy on the Brit-import sitcom Absolutely Fabulous) close to desperation. Then, out of the sky, a savior drops with a thud. He is Rocky Roads (Gibson), the "flying rooster" from a traveling circus, and he vainly promises to teach the hens--this coop of flighty, flightless birds--how to soar to freedom. But while Rocky the flying churl plays up to "all the beautiful English chicks," Mrs. Tweedy has bigger, nastier plans. She has bought a machine that will turn her chicken stalag into a factory for chicken pies. The prison camp...