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The definitive volume on opossums, a group of ecologically and scientifically important mammals, covering natural history, evolution, behavior, and biogeography. Opossums are the most diverse and ecologically important group of New World marsupials, although only the Virginia opossum is familiar to North American residents. In fact, many species of opossums are found in Neotropical rainforests, savannas, and other habitats, where they are key participants in food webs and other ecological relationships. One species, the short-tail opossum (Monodelphis domestica), has recently become a model organism for biomedical researchers. Eclipsed in the public imagination by their Australian relatives,...
The vast terrain between Panama and Tierra del Fuego contains some of the worlds richest mammalian fauna, but until now it has lacked a comprehensive systematic reference to the identification, distribution, and taxonomy of its mammals. The first such book of its kind, Mammals of South America both summarizes existing information and encourages further research of the mammals indigenous to the region. It includes identification keys and brief descriptions of each order, family, and genus. Species accounts include taxonomic descriptions, synonymies, keys to identification, distributions with maps and a gazetteer of marginal localities, lists of recognized subspecies, brief summaries of natural history information, and discussions of issues related to taxonomic interpretations.
We hear routinely about dinosaurs unearthed in the Gobi Desert, about new marsupials found in the forests of Madagascar, about darling deep sea squid in the polar regions. These discoveries tend to be accompanied by wondrous feats of adventuring scientists. But just as one can experience the world in a backyard, or farther reaches of the world with a good book and a comfy armchair, scientists themselves know that the natural history museums of the world contain some of the best terrain for discovering new species. In recent years scientists have found in museum drawers and cabinets a new rove beetle collected by Darwin, a tiny lungless salamander thinner than a matchstick, a monkey from the Brazilian rainforest, and a 40 million year old beardog. The Lost Species shares the thrill of spelunking in museum basements, digging in museum trays, and breathing new life in taxidermied beings--a in a days' adventure for the scientists in this book. These discoveries help tell the story of life, and the priceless collections of natural history museums.
The second installment in a planned three-volume series, this book provides the first substantive review of South American rodents published in over fifty years. Increases in the reach of field research and the variety of field survey methods, the introduction of bioinformatics, and the explosion of molecular-based genetic methodologies have all contributed to the revision of many phylogenetic relationships and to a doubling of the recognized diversity of South American rodents. The largest and most diverse mammalian order on Earth—and an increasingly threatened one—Rodentia is also of great ecological importance, and Rodents is both a timely and exhaustive reference on these ubiquitous ...
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The present volume collects contributions addressing different aspects of the measurement of linguistic differences, a topic which probably is as old as language itself but at the same time has acquired renewed interest over the last decade or so, reflecting a rapid development of data-intensive computing in all fields of research, including linguistics.
Kashibo-Kakataibo is the westernmost Panoan language and, therefore, the one closest to the Andes Mountains. In terms of its typological profile, Kashibo-Kakataibo is a (mainly) postpositional and agglutinating language with a highly synthetic verbal morphology, which includes a highly complex tense system with several markers, some of which also express aspectual meanings. Kashibo-Kakataibo presents a mixed prosodic system, which combines stress and tone features. In addition, like with other Pano languages, Kashibo-Kakataibo exhibits a number of transitivity-related issues of high typological interest. First of all, the language shows an extremely complex system of grammatical relations, w...