KOALAS Koalas are just too nice for their own good. And except for the occasional baby taken by birds of prey, koalas have no natural enemies. In an ideal world, the life of an arboreal couch potato would be perfectly safe and acceptable. Just two hundred years ago, koalas flourished across Australia. Now they seem […]

READING 46 ANSWERS (SEVERE) DROUGHT LARGE SEEDS HEAVY RAINS SMALL SEEDS FINCH EVOLUTION MEDIUM-SIZED BILLS HUMAN POPULATION RICE FALSE NOT GIVEN TRUE FALSE TRUE NAVIGATION AND COMMUNICATIONS RADIATION ANTENNAE SMOKE E C A B D FALSE TRUE TRUE NOT GIVEN III VII I IV IX VIII V II FALSE TRUE NOT GIVEN TRUE TRUE B

Human Interference and Finches Today, the quest continues. On Daphne Major —one of the most desolate of the Galápagos Islands, an uninhabited volcanic cone where cacti and shrubs seldom grow higher than a researcher’s knee Peter and Rosemary Grant have spent more than three decades watching Darwin’s finches respond to the challenges of storms, drought

THE RISE OF DINOSAURS Everybody knows that the dinosaurs were killed by an asteroid. Something big hit the earth 65 million years ago and, when the dust had fallen, so had the great reptiles. There is thus a nice, if ironic, symmetry in the idea that a similar impact brought about the dinosaurs’ rise. That