The coelacanth

Analysis fossils coast decomposed prevented presumed exciting enabling carrying ancient common extinct hollow peculiar

The fish the coelacanth which was (1) ___ during the early history of the world, gets its name from the (2) ___ Greek term for ‘hollow spine’. At the beginning of the twentieth century, scientists believed that it was (3) ___. Indeed, they worked out from the (4) ___ of coelacanths that it had been extinct for over sixty million years.

Then, in 1938, an extremely (5) ___ scientific discovery was made. A local man fishing off the (6) ___ of South Africa caught a very (7) ___ fish. He brought it back to the mainland for (8) ___, and it was identified from its (9) ___ spine and the shape of its fins as a coelacanth. The fish was not extinct after all! Unfortunately, the fish (10) ___ rapidly, which (11) ___ scientists from (12) ___ out further studies on it. However, in 1952 a number of coelacanths have been caught in the seas around east Africa, (13) ___ the scientists to examine the fish which everyone (14) ___ had died together with the dinosaurs.

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Crocodiles: scary but lovely to watch

For centuries, people lived with and respected the all-power (1) crocodile. Those snap (2) jaws and lethal teeth frightened all the attack (3) away, whether human or animal. People were also fascinated by their character (4) calls, their beauty and their intellect (5). Fortune (6), it was their beautiful skin which put them under threaten (7). When explore (8) realized how valuable crocodile skin was, everything changed. Hunters risked their lives – and sometimes lost them − in order to satisfaction (9) the world’s demand for crocodile skin.

Bad (10) was to come. The crocodiles’ homes began to disappear as new towns and industrial (11) were developed on the land near swamps and rivers. Luckily for the crocodiles, people realized that a world without them would just not be the same, and now they have been office (12) declared endangered species. In some parts of the world, there are now parks where crocodiles may live safety (13), with laws to protect them.

“It is law (14) to kill crocodiles,” says the conserve (15) Charles Swaby, who has spent the last thirty years protect (16) the Jamaican crocodiles. The problem is that when farm animals are killed by crocodiles, farmers

ignorant (17) the law and kill them. That is what Charles is fighting against. “Crocodiles are much more scare (18) of us than we are of them. They are scary but lovely to watch,” he adds. If Charles, and others like him, can convince the world to share this opinion, crocodiles will be with us forever.

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Extinct species

I. An norm (1) egg, with circumference of 81.78 cm, was found on a western Australian beach in 1993 by three children who initially take (2) it for a very large smooth rock. What makes the egg even more ordinary (3) is that the bird that laid it – a monster (4) large flightless bird called Aepyonis Maximus or ‘elephant bird’ – became extinct about 400 years ago and lived on the island of Madagascar, at little (5) 6,500 kilometers from the Australian coastline. Scientists believe the egg must have been transported from Madagascar on the prevail (6) ocean currents to the converge (7) point of the Indian and Southern Oceans where the egg was actually found.

II. About 40 million years ago, a fierce hunter, called the saber-tooth (8) cat, lived on the earth. Its remains have been found on the grass (9) plains of North and South America. These history (10) cats, which looked more like lions, were distance (11) cousins of modern tigers.

III. The dodo was a large, flight (12) bird with short legs, a huge beak, stubby wings and a small feather (13) tail. It lived peace (14) on the island of Mauritius for so long that it lost its able (15) to fly. Within 100 years of the arrive (16) of humans, the dodo had become a rare bird. The last one was killed in the 1680s.

IV. Though declaration (17) a protected species, the Tasmanian tiger became extinct – the last know (18) Tasmanian tiger died in capture (19) in the Hobart Zoo in 1936.

V. The Moa was a long-necked flightless bird, which was nation (20) to New Zealand and which looked something like an ostrich, only several times bigger. In the Maori language this word is used also to description (21) any bird of similar appearance. The Moa was last reported to be seen more than a century ago.

VI. The Quagga was an animal resemble (22) a zebra that used to live in southern Africa. It is now extinct, but the last one died in the zoo as late as a century ago. This usual (23) word comes from Afrikaans, which in its turn borrowed it from Hottentot.

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