Science: Fossils of the Future

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...

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