Inside the zone, as thousands of soldiers continued to scour the landscape of radionuclides, bulldoze ancient settlements into the ground, and toss contaminated furniture from the windows of apartments in Pripyat, scientists began to notice strange new phenomena in the wildlife they found there. Hedgehogs, voles, and shrews had become radioactive, and mallards had developed genetic abnormalities; in the cooling reservoir of the plant, silver carp grew to monstrous sizes; the leaves of the trees around the Red Forest had swelled to supernatural proportions, including giant conifers with pine
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