ForeFATHERS

Usage examples of ancestors.

The size of small dogs with long, trailing tails, these fast, solitary runners, browsing on leaves and fallen fruit, were ancestors of the mighty artiodactyl family, which would one day include pigs, sheep, cattle, reindeer, antelope, giraffes, and camels.

For generations, reaching back to the red-tinged mindlessness of their ancestors, this species of carnivore had hunted in mating pairs, and so they did now.

The ancestors of the true carnivores, which would eventually include the dogs and cats, were still small, ferretlike animals, busy, opportunistic general feeders.

Ugly animals the size of ferrets, sometime burrow-raiders who scavenged opportunistically from the kills of other predators, the miacoids were an unprepossessing bunch, but nonetheless were the ancestors of the mighty cats and wolves and bears of later times.

But on the open water birds waded, ancestors of flamingos and avocets, and huge water lilies rested languidly on the surface.

These were among the first proboscideans, the ancestors of elephants and mammoths.

But the crowders, like their common adapid ancestors, relied heavily on the caterpillars and grubs they snatched from the branches, and they had sharp, narrow teeth to process their insect prey.

The muttas hatched their eggs on the ground, as their ancestors had always done, which made them vulnerable to opportunistic predators like the burrowers.

They were the ancestors of the true elephants and the mammoths, who had yet to appear.

These new mammals were larger than their archaic ancestors, lean and long-legged with specialized feet and a reduced number of toes to help them walk and run long distances and at speed.

And when she was dead in her turn, there would be nothing to say he had ever existed, and he would be gone into the final blank darkness that had swallowed up all of his ancestors, every one.

Right now the ancestors of Demosthenes and Lincoln and Churchill spoke nothing much more than motherese.

At night they would even make treetop nests like their forest-dwelling ancestors before them.

A deep part of her awareness experienced a kind of regret that her remote ancestors had given up the gift of the air.

But he was the last to live as his ancestors had before the coming of the moderns.