Florin Bors, aged 8 from Bacau, northern Romania, wearing a bear fur takes a break from performing a holiday season ritual in Bucharest, Romania, Tuesday, December 16, 2014. In pre-Christian rural traditions, dancers wearing colored costumes or animal furs, touring house to house in villages singing and dancing to ward off evil. In recent years following the economic downturn in Romania, a European Union member since 2007, the tradition has moved to Romania's cities where dancers travel to perform the ritual for money. (Photo by Octav Ganea/AP Photo/Mediafax)

“Cassowaries are large, flightless birds related to emus and (more distantly) to ostriches, rheas, and kiwis”, writes Olivia Judson in the September issue of National Geographic magazine. How large? People-size: Adult males stand well over five foot five and top 110 pounds. Females are even taller, and can weigh more than 160 pounds. Dangerous when roused, they’re shy and peaceable when left alone. But even birds this big and tough are prey to habitat loss. The dense New Guinea and Australia rain forests where they live have dwindled. Today cassowaries might number 1,500 to 2,000. And because they help shape those same forests – by moving seeds from one place to another – “if they vanish”, Judson writes, “the structure of the forest would gradually change” too. (Photo by Christian Ziegler/National Geographic)

A dog rests on a buffalo near Ravi River in Lahore, Pakistan, on Febuary 4, 2013. (Photo by Mohsin Raza/Reuters)

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Elephants spray tourists with water in celebration of the Songkran water festival in Thailand's Ayutthaya province, about 80 km (50 miles) north of Bangkok, April 9, 2014. (Photo by Rungroj Yongrit/EFE)

A hairdressing mannequin is seen outside a hair salon amid as Typhoon Matmo hits Nantong, Jiangsu province July 25, 2014. Matmo, which made landfall in Fujian Province on Wednesday, has brought strong winds and heavy downpours to more areas in China after it moved northward on Thursday, Xinhua News Agency reported. (Photo by Reuters/Stringer)

A visitor walks on a giant chalk artwork called “Wasting Time” at the Chalk Urban Arts Festival in Sydney on October 25, 2014. The picture is the biggest 3-D artwork created in Australia by two artists, Leon Keer from Holland and Jenny McCracken from Australia. (Photo by Peter Parks/AFP Photo)

An Indonesian student protester runs after he caught fire while throwing a molotov cocktail towards police during a protest against the new president's decision to hike fuel prices this week in Makassar, South Sulawesi Province November 19, 2014. (Photo by Yusuf Ahmad/Reuters)

A woman walks with her baby past a PM militarized police soldier in position and aiming his rifle in Rocinha favela in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil on September 23, 2017. Although shooting was reported in the early hours of Saturday in Rocinha – for the seventh day running – officials said that Friday's deployment of 950 soldiers to reinforce police had brought the crisis under control. (Photo by Carl De Souza/AFP Photo)