Tiny Costa Rica, with fewer than five million people, exports more manufactured goods than Egypt, which has a population of about eighty million.
The group stage largely met these expectations, featuring a healthy average of 2.83 goals a game, as well as highly improbable results like Germany's pulping of Portugal, the Dutch decimation of Spain and tiny Costa Rica's victories over previous winners Uruguay and Italy.
Mexico lost, 2-1, Tuesday night to tiny Costa Rica, the country without an army.
In many respects, tiny Costa Rica still towers above its neighbors.
"People are like, 'How can you keep a horse in your tiny apartment?"' said Mr. Costa, who moved with Wilson and his pug, Dennis, from a 1,500-square-foot 1,500-square-foot 1,500-square-footlapartmentionship.
Costa Rica is tiny, smaller than West Virginia, but huge in versatility, with coasts on two oceans, coral-lined beaches and active volcanoes, luxury resorts and surf camps, roaring streams and rich biodiversity.
And it's so — at least during the fashionable months of July and August, if you limit your visit on the island to the tiny, northeast jet-set enclave known as Costa Smeralda, or the Emerald Coast.
Similar, sampling-intensity biases undoubtedly contributed to high relative diversity evident at other locations, including Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, Los Roques (Venezuela), the Cayman Islands, Panama and Costa Rica, the Colombian islands offshore from Nicaragua, and tiny Navassa Island, a U.S. territory between Jamaica and Hispaniola.
Costa has spent years learning to coax such stories out of tiny volcanic crystals with a technique he helped develop, known as diffusion chronometry.
Costa Rica had maintained in a hearing earlier this year that Nicaragua had "invaded" the tiny stretch of territory on its north-east coast.
Tiny Sunbirds Far Away, which focuses on the life of a young girl in Nigeria, is shortlisted for the Costa first novel award next month.
