So on one hand you might have an animal which still had a handful of extant specimens, scooped from their habitat just before it was razed, now fed and watered in enclosures like tribesmen exhibited in some nineteenth-century world’s fair after the obliteration of their culture. Death in life. And on the other hand you might have an animal which at present happened to have a living population of zero—yet if any scientist were ever curious about it, she could not only draw on an allencompassing record of its physiology and behavior, she could then test her theories on a virtual specimen in a
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