By Susan Milius
Elephant-biologist-in-training Joseph P. Dudley didn’t need a message from the department chairman to know that his plans for a master’s degree project had crashed and burned.
“It made world news,” he recalls dryly. The year was 1984, and Dudley was in graduate school at the University of Florida in Gainesville. Like most of the newspaper-reading world, he saw war bulletins from Sri Lanka about the Tamil Tigers fighting to expand their territory.