If you happen to be a fossil cat, there are two main routes to get media attention. The first – be Smilodon. The celebrated sabercat is a media darling, and any major study about how this felid fed has a good chance of getting some play in the news.

Not every fossil cat had such formidable fangs or is as much of a paleontological star. (Sorry Homotherium, you’re just never going to be as popular as ol’ Smilodon fatalis.) In the alternate route, however, all that is required of a fossil cat is to have lived in roughly the same place and at the same time as prehistoric humans. At the very least,...

MAPUTO, Mozambique — When blowing up land mines for military training is accompanied by a goat sacrifice, the cultural divide between the U.S. and the rest of the world looms large. Yet more and more the job of U.S. troops abroad is to bridge that gap in the service of peacekeeping by training local armies.

As recent developments in Libya have shown, in some parts of the world the U.S. is loath to put its own troops into action, and having soldiers trained by the U.S. in countries near conflict areas like Somalia is an ever-more-appealing alternative. The future of Iraq depends in part on...