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Books > Sport & Leisure > Natural history, country life & pets > Dinosaurs & the prehistoric world
Fifty-two years after the pink-headed duck was last seen in the
wild, Rory Nugent set off for India in search of this exceptionally
rare bird. In Calcutta he prowled the fowl market, where a few of
the ducks used to appear during the Raj. Traveling on to Delhi, he
was befriended by a Cambridge-educated smuggler, and he learned of
remote regions to the north where the duck might be found. In
Sikkim, following the trail of a Yeti, he became lost in the Valley
of Bliss and nearly imprisoned inside a forest of rhododendrons,
each the size of a ranch house. Making his way to Assam, he bought
a 13-foot skiff and paddled the Brahmaputra River from Burma to
Bangladesh, with stops on an island, considered to be Kali's left
breast, and at a Tantrist temple, where he stumbled on a grisly
ritual in a graveyard. In a secluded marsh along the river he may
have spotted the world's rarest duck.
As the Ice Age came to an end, North America lost a stunning
variety of animals. Mammoths, mastodons, ground-dwelling sloths the
size of elephants, beavers the size of bears, pronghorn antelope
the size of poodles, llamas, and carnivores to chase
them-sabertooth cats, dire wolves, American lions and cheetahs;
these and many more were gone by 10,000 years ago. Giant Sloths and
Sabertooth Cats surveys all these animals, with a particular focus
on the Great Basin. The book also explores the major attempts to
explain the extinctions. Because some believe that they were due to
the activities of human hunters, the author also reviews the
archaeological evidence left by the earliest known human occupants
of the Great Basin, showing that people were here at the same time
and in the same places as many of the extinct animals. Were these
animals abundant in the Great Basin? A detailed analysis of the
distinctive assemblages of plants that now live in this region
leads to a surprising, and perhaps controversial, conclusion about
those abundances.
I would like to present a plausible explanation as to why planet
earth and its prehistoric life forms are possibly millions of years
old and yet present life forms, of which man is the last and
highest of God's creation, are very young-probably 6,000-7000 years
young.
Jurassic Brunch is a historically accurate illustrated narrative of
the legendary dinosaur Benedict and his quest for the world's first
bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich. This fantastic piece of
non-fiction will educate and entertain anyone who is a fan of
brunch, or its Jurassic origin.
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