Science: Fossils of the Future

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Geologist Lee Merriam Talbot, 25 is an animal man by heritage: his grandfather, C. Hart Merriam, was the first chief of the U.S. Biological Survey. So when the Survival Service of the International Union for the Protection of Nature, formed under UNESCO sponsorship, offered him a job, Talbot snapped it up.

The job was beyond the wildest dreams of the ex-Marine ecologist. His assignment: to travel through the Near East and Southeast Asia, paying calls on animals threatened with extinction, and try to figure out how to keep them from following the dodo. Last week Talbot was back in the U.S., having escaped extinction himself on several occasions by a narrow margin, and bringing curious tales about the "fossils of the future." Rhino & Cures. The biggest of the threatened animals is the Indian rhinoceros, of which only a few hundred survive. A creature that only an animal man could love, it has the temper of a bald hornet, the odor of cattle-boat bilge water and the bodily build of a Sherman tank.

It resents ecologists, as it does everything else, so Talbot made his survey from the back of a tall bull elephant. Once he came face to face with a mother rhino as she bathed her child in a mud wallow.

The elephant wheeled and bolted. The rhino charged, snorting in the elephant's wake and trying to gore him with her 24-in. horn. Talbot watched from the rumble seat as the rhino drew alongside the elephant and ripped an 18-in. gash in his side. Then the two animals veered apart as if on diverging rails. "I suppose " says Talbot, "that mama went back to her baby and told him: That's how it's done.' "

As Talbot made his rounds, he found that the trouble among dwindling breeds was almost always man, and that there was generally some factor involved besides mere competition for land and food. Rhinos, for instance, are persistently hunted all over Southeast Asia because they are believed to have medicinal value. The Chinese consider powdered rhinoceros horn a powerful aphrodisiac (it is not), and will pay $2,500 for a single horn. Other parts of the animal, too have honored places in the Asian pharmacopoeia. Cups made of rhino horn detect poison by shattering to bits or by making the poison bubble. Rhino shin is good for leg trouble; the hip cures female disorders. Even the dung is beneficial for skin ailments.

Lion & Oryx. Thus the rhino has been hunted almost to extinction. In Nepal says Talbot, the Indian rhinoceros has another ecological problem. The Nepalese use rhinos to speed the upward reincarnation of the souls of their ancestors The cure for delay in this process is to kill a rhino, sit inside its carcass, and drink to the health of the ancestor's soul in rhino blood.

Other threatened animals have different relationships with capricious man The chief threat to the Asiatic lions has been glory-seeking maharajas, who have hunted the beasts with modern firearms, as their ancestors once hunted them with more primitive weapons. The result: few lions remain.