Believe-lt-Or-Nots

Roy Chapman Andrews is best known as the man who discovered fossil dinosaur eggs in Mongolia's Gobi Desert. Before that, no one knew whether dinosaurs laid eggs or bore their young alive. Andrews has done a great deal of other scientific junketing, slaking an insatiable curiosity which he has had ever since he was a Wisconsin boy. Several times he has been on death's brink--once a black boy in Borneo yanked him out of range of a huge python which was about to drop on the explorer from a tree.

Lately Animalizer Andrews has quieted down somewhat as director of Manhattan's American Museum of Natural History. But even there, since he is able to poke into all the museum's affairs, from blue whales to green sapphires, he has added a lot of vicarious information to his own experiences. Into his latest book, This Amazing Planet (Putnam; $2), Dr. Andrews has packed this miscellaneous knowledge. The book adds up to a fascinating heap of glorified Ripleyisms, of scientific believe-it-or-nots. Samples:

> Stationed at South Georgia Island in the subAntarctic, the museum's curator of oceanic birds was puzzled because he almost never came across any dead Johnny penguins. The mystery was solved one day when he climbed a long hill and found a small, transparent lake made of snow water. Around its brim stood a number of sad, sickly-looking Johnny penguins. Now & then one of them would plop into the lake, never to emerge. Looking down into the clear water, the curator saw "on the cold blue bottom, with their flippers outstretched . . . hundreds, possibly thousands of dead Johnny penguins. . . . Most of them lay face up, their breasts reflecting gleams of white from the darker water."

> It is not true, says Author Andrews, that bulls get mad when they see red--all mammals except monkeys and men are colorblind. Many animals can be taught to detect slight differences of shade, but when variously colored disks emitting the same intensity of light are presented, the animals are baffled. Thus a dog sees the world, including his master, in various shades of grey, as in a photograph. But birds, fish and insects can distinguish colors.

> Killer whales, 25 to 30 ft. long, are the wolves of the sea. Dr. Andrews had heard that killers relish the tongues of other and bigger whales, often tear them out alive. He never believed it until he saw it done. Off the coast of Korea, a pack of killers bore down on a herd of California grey whales, which are about 50 ft. long. The greys were paralyzed with terror. "I watched a grey whale turn on its back with flippers outspread and lie helpless at the surface. Rushing at full speed, a killer put his nose against the whale's lips, forced its mouth open, and tore out great chunks of the soft, sponge-like tongue. A half-dozen other killers began tearing at the giant body, literally eating the whale alive."

> In North China, Roy Chapman Andrews ate locusts cooked in sugar, found them "good, crisp and sweet."

> Polar bears have been seen swimming 300 miles from land.

> India has the world's worst hailstorms. One storm there killed more than 100 people. Largest U. S. hailstone on record fell in Nebraska twelve years ago. It weighed one and one-half pounds, measured 17 inches around.

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