diminutive

Aside from fronting his namesake band Dio from 1982 through 2010, the diminutive singer was known for his piercing vocals and being among the first rockers to flash the famed devil horns hand gesture.

This year, biologists collected samples from nine sites in California, swabbing the diminutive animals’ noses and forearms, said Katrina Smith, statewide coordinator for small mammal conservation for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.

“Many Latinos are going to Trompito Land, fool,” he told a caller during the podcast taping I attended, using a diminutive — Little Trump — uttered by the former president’s Latino haters that Tejada has reappropriated as a loving moniker.

Sofia, though, isn’t a diminutive girl or Carmela Soprano.

Had the asteroid missed or even struck a different place on the planet, then the world would have continued to be covered in forests of resin-oozing monkey puzzle trees and ginkgoes, and a place where dinosaurs of all shapes and sizes proliferated while mammals thrived only at diminutive size.