Category: Deep Dives
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Yellowstone contains more than ten thousand hydrothermal features. More than five hundred active geysers.
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The wolverine has a branding problem. Its name has been assigned to a comic-book character, sports teams, armored vehicles, knives, boots, and at least one type of person who owns too much tactical equipment.
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The first problem is the word **tree**. You walk into an aspen grove and see hundreds or thousands of pale trunks.
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Drive across much of the upper Midwest and the landscape can feel broadly legible. Rolling farmland.
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A Turkey Vulture is difficult to market. The head is bare and red. The diet is dead animals. When overheated, it may defecate on its own legs.
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The Palouse of eastern Washington and northern Idaho looks like someone applied a smoothing tool to farmland.
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Late winter in a wet forest looks mostly inactive. Snow. Mud. Dead leaves. Gray trunks. Then, in a saturated patch of ground, a strange purple hood pushes upward.
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The pronghorn has spent centuries being introduced incorrectly. American antelope. Prairie antelope.
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Lake Michigan contains no saltwater. No ocean tides in the ordinary sense. No connection to the sea that matters to the person standing on the beach.
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The hellbender is a giant salamander that lives underneath rocks in clean rivers. That sentence should be enough.