Extinct But Not Forgotten As a child I had a fierce nostalgia for the Dodo bird. The Dodo is a squat, flightless bird last seen around 1681. Man's first recorded encounter with the Dodo was in 1581 when it ambled onto the beach to greet Dutch sailors as they came ashore an island off the coast of Africa. The bird was friendly and curious, and for this reason they named it Dodo—as in dummy or fool. After all, what animal could afford to be so fearless? It took only a hundred years for this meeting to prove fatal to the Dodo.

Scientists claim that up to 98 percent of all the species that ever lived on Earth have gone the way of the Dodo. One was the woolly mammoth. Recently my radio carried the story of a team of scientists in Russia who have discovered the body of a woolly mammoth. It was found intact in the frozen cliffs of Siberia. They want to take the animal's perfectly preserved DNA and clone it. If they do, a mammoth, crossed with an elephant, will stand on this earth for the first time in 10,000 years. I imagine a scientist's shock and joy when, pressed against a frozen cliff, he reaches his arm into a hole cut into the ice and buries his fingers into course, thick hair. It isn't the desire to play God that drives him. It's something more gentle—a yearning to pet the great beast and console it for thousands of years of loneliness.
A.)Because men came to the island were it lived
B.)Because it made foolish decisions
C.)Because woolly mammoths hunted it
D.) Because it froze in ice