Word: archers
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...over a piece of rock the size of two bricks. What's inside the rock will make Creaser's day and remind the rest of the party that, for all the wonders this place has yielded, it has much more to give. "Work at Riversleigh," says team leader Mike Archer, "will go on forever...
...entitled to feel hopeful as he takes aim. As fossil deposits go, Riversleigh is like a golf course where you can't help but shoot sub-par. Bones abound: even the untrained eye can spot them protruding from the gray limestone outcrops. In an area of 40 sq. km, Archer's teams have found and named hundreds of sites since 1976, when he and palaeontologist Henk Godthelp decided to check out reports that Riversleigh - then a cattle station, now part of Lawn Hill National Park - might contain valuable fossils. And it did - in the same way that the Louvre could...
...lately Archer, among others, has begun to view Riversleigh as more than just a portal into the ancient past. It is also, he believes, a harbinger. In stunning detail, Riversleigh chronicles a collapse in Australia's mammal diversity in the past 25 million years. Archer warns that if humans don't stop abusing the earth and "incarcerating our precious biotas in reserves that are demonstrably too small to sustain them," we could jeopardize our survival as a species. Alarmist? Keep in mind, he suggests, that the average mammalian species hangs around for 5 million years; Homo sapiens has been around...
...single strike breaks the rock in two, revealing a mass of bone in each piece. Creaser gazes at what he recognizes to be the jaws of a largish animal, one that perished some 24 million years ago. But what kind of animal? The others gather around, including Archer, who's one of Australia's best at classifying - all but instantly - what would look to most people like generic bone. "The finest specimen of a marsupial lion jaw that's ever been found," he declares. It seems to have belonged, he explains later, to a previously unknown, intermediate species of this...
...also why juries are more and more unwilling to impose death sentences on juvenile offenders and why 31 states prohibit the practice. As we learn more from science and as it converges with legislation and the law, a consensus on this issue is increasingly clear. DENNIS W. ARCHER, PRESIDENT American Bar Association Chicago...