"Howard Waldrop - Winter Quarters" - читать интересную книгу автора (Waldrop Howard)dinosaurs if you want to go the mosquito-in-amber wild goose chase. This comes down to questions of
pure science--" "If we can, we have to?" "You're talking like the people who don't want them -- or the two wooly rhinos -- back," said Fred. "No, I'm giving you their argument, like people give me. They're here because we couldn't stop ourselves from bringing them back, any more than we could stop ourselves from killing them off in the first place. Where was the religion in that?" I was looking back and forth. I was sure they'd had this discussion before, but never in front of me. Arnaud was eating. Jason was reading his book for the tenth time. Arnaud looked at the two docs as he finished the last of everything, including a pie crust off Fred's plate. "Plenty religion involved," said Arnaud. "People just don't understand the mammoths." Fred and Bob looked at him. "Yeah?" asked Bob. "They let me know," said Arnaud. He patted his stomach and nodded toward the door. As we let him off at the circus, he reached in his shirt pocket and handed Jason six long black hairs, making a motion with his left arm hanging off his nose and his right forming a curve in front of him. "Mammoth hair! Oh boy oh boy!" said Jason. Then Arnaud pointed to Dr. Bob and made the signal from the sixty-year-old TV show The Prisoner -- Be Seeing You. -<*>- That night I read about mammontelephants. The first were cloned less than thirty years ago, and there were some surprises. The normal gestation period for the Indian elephant is twenty-two months; for the mammontelephants it was closer to eighteen. The tusks of Indian elephant cows normally stick out less than twenty centimeters from their mouths; that of the mammontelephants two, two and a half meters and still growing. (What the tusks of the males, all six or seven of them in the world, will be, no one knows yet, as the first is only six years old now -- it's guessed they could grow as long as those of fossil true bull mammoths.) Their trumpeting, as I said, is lower, deeper, and creepier than either Indian or African elephants (a separate species). It's assumed they communicate over long distances with subsonic rumbles like their relatives. They have developed the fatty humps on their heads and above their shoulders, even though most aren't in really cold climates. Yes, they have the butt-flap that keeps the wind out in cold weather. The big black long guard hairs (like the ones Arnaud gave Jason) are scattered over the thick underfur, itself forty centimeters thick. Further clonings -- with twelve- and thirteen-year-old mammontelephants carrying baby mammontelephants to term -- has speeded up the process -- most elephants don't reproduce until they're fifteen or so. And you get a more mammoth mammontelephant. What will happen when Mr. and Ms. Mammontelephant get together in another six or seven years? They might not like each other. That's where Science will come in again.... Pretty good for an old lady English prof, huh? -<*>- |
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