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Sundarbans

(Encyclopedia)Sundarbans, large, heavily forested swamp region, c.3,860 sq mi (10,000 sq km), in the S Ganges delta on the Bay of Bengal, about 60% in SW Bangladesh and the rest in West Bengal state, India. The mor...

Wilmut, Sir Ian

(Encyclopedia)Wilmut, Sir Ian, 1944– British embryologist, b. Warwickshire, England, Ph.D. Cambridge, 1971. While doing postdoctoral research at Cambridge, he was part of the team that produced Frostie, the first...

threonine

(Encyclopedia)CE5 threonine thrēˈənēn [key], organic compound, one of the 22 α-amino acids commonly found in animal proteins. Only the l-stereoisomer appears in mammalian protein. It is one of several essen...

wisent

(Encyclopedia)wisent vēˈsənt [key], name for the European bison, Bison bonasus. It is a close relative of the American bison, B. bison. Longer legged and less heavily built than its American cousin, the wisent m...

Rothamsted

(Encyclopedia)Rothamsted rŏthˈəmstĭd [key], world's oldest and England's most important agricultural experiment station, now the main center of the Institute of Arable Crops Research (IACR). It was founded in 1...

scale, in zoology

(Encyclopedia)scale, in zoology, an outgrowth, either bony or horny, of the skin of an animal. The major component of the scales of fishes is bone, and they are formed directly in the skin membrane as the fish grow...

reaper

(Encyclopedia)reaper, early farm machine drawn by draft animals or tractor and used to harvest grain. Its historical predecessors were the sickle and the cradle scythe, which are still used in some parts of the wor...

Bacon, Francis, English painter

(Encyclopedia)Bacon, Francis, 1910–92, English painter, b. Dublin. A self-taught artist, Bacon rejected abstraction in painting to explore a repertoire of strange, fractured, and often bizarre figurative images, ...

Porifera

(Encyclopedia)CE5 A. Canal systems of the three morphological types of sponges B. Internal anatomy of an asconoid sponge, representative of the phylum Porifera Porifera pōrĭfˈərə [key] [Lat.,=pore bearer],...

dwarfism

(Encyclopedia)dwarfism, condition in which an animal or plant is less than normal in size and lacks the capacity for normal growth. Dwarfism is deliberately produced and perpetuated in certain species (e.g., in bre...