Once upon a time long ago, a Dodo bird found a Calvaria seed and ate it. This was the start of a long love affair between Dodo birds and Calvaria trees. It was a love affair, because the Dodo birds spread the seeds to many new areas, and the Calvaria trees prospered as never before.

The story was always the same: the seeds which weren't digested had a little tougher shell, which the Dodo's stomach acid and gizzard muscles couldn't crack. Over tens of thousands of years, the Dodos encouraged the Calvaria trees to grow tough-er seeds, because these were the only ones that survived the Dodo's gizzard. At the same time, the Calvaria trees encouraged tougher gizzard muscles and stronger stomach acids in the Do-dos, so they could digest the tougher seeds. The two trends rein-forced each other as the evolutionary love affair continued.

Then in the late 1600's, a new lover appeared, who loved the Dodo bird only as food. The Dodo birds were harvested like Lil' Abner's Schmoos until suddenly they were extinct. The Calvaria trees were very sad. They kept producing their tasty seeds for the Dodos, but the Dodos were gone. Descendents of the harvesters of the Dodos began to harvest the Calvaria trees for their beautiful fine wood, but no young Calvaria trees sprouted to replace them. By 1975, there were only 13 trees left, and all of them were more than 300 years old. The seeds were too tough to sprout without the softening and abrasion of the Dodo's gut.

Finally, timber scientists discovered how to soak the seeds in acid and tumble them with abrasives to weaken the tough seed cover. Then the seeds would sprout. The Calvaria trees were saved from extinction because of their valuable wood, but condemned to produce "test-tube babies" for the rest of their existence.

Why talk about a "love affair" between a bird and a tree? We need stories, pictures and dramatizations to accompany the scientific facts that presently we are ignoring. Rational scientific fact is not enough for most people. The picture of Adam naming all the plants and animals in the world is a simple but wrong idea which most of us learned as children. There are now 420,000 named living plant species,1.3 million named living animal species, and perhaps a billion extinct species.

Our myths which teach the importance of man don't match the reality of the importance of many other seed-distributing animals. The missmatch between facts and world-view cause us to ignore many very significant facts. At least 30 species of trees are already doomed to become extinct or near extinct ---- because we have killed most of the elephants which disperse their seeds. The diversity of many sections of tropical forests is already destined to be ruined, even if the trees are never cut down ---- because local hunters have killed the monkeys and large birds which disperse two-thirds of the fruit tree seeds.

Many species of wild potatoes and other plants which could enrich our food supply are already doomed ---- because man-made hybrid "Killer Bees" have displaced the native bees which pollinated the plants. "Killer Bees" should be called "Extinction Bees" because they ignore so many plants that native bees once pollinated.

At the rate we're going, the new Millennium's Adam may be able to name all the remaining species. And 300 years from now they'll still be saying "Here's something else 20th Century man screwed up!"

1. Birds don't digest every seed they eat; the ones that aren't digested get "planted" with just the right amount of fertilizer in the bird's droppings.

2. Calvaria seeds have withstood over 1300 pounds of pressure before cracking, while hickory nuts crack with less than 100 pounds of force.