Word: aysheaia
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...Weird Wonders Inside locked cabinets at the Smithsonian Institution nestle snapshots in stone as vivid as any photograph. There, engraved on slices of ink-black shale, are the myriad inhabitants of a vanished world, from plump Aysheaia prancing on caterpillar-like legs to crafty Ottoia, lurking in a burrow and extending its predatory proboscis. Excavated in the early 1900s from a geological formation in the Canadian Rockies known as the Burgess Shale, these relics of the earliest animals to appear on earth are now revered as priceless treasures. Yet for half a century after their discovery, the Burgess Shale fossils...
...million years ago and swept into water so deep and oxygen-free that the bacteria that should have decayed their tissues couldn't survive. Preserved were not just the hard-shelled creatures familiar to Darwin and his contemporaries but also the fossilized remains of soft-bodied beasts like Aysheaia and Ottoia. More astonishing still were remnants of delicate interior structures, like Ottoia's gut with its last, partly digested meal. (Read "The Ever Evolving Theories of Darwin...
...Carroll's lab on the University of Wisconsin's Madison campus has begun importing tiny velvet worms that inhabit rotting logs in the dry forests of Australia. Blowing bubbles of spittle and waving their fat legs in the air, they look, he marvels, virtually identical to their Cambrian cousin Aysheaia, whose evocative portrait appears in the pages of the Burgess Shale. Soon Carroll hopes to answer a pivotal question: Is the genetic tool kit needed to construct a velvet worm smaller than the one the arthropods...
...communicate her sense of excitement, Nash uses bold metaphorical leaps and descriptive passages that can bring to life a half-billion-year-old fossil ("plump Aysheaia," she writes, "prancing on caterpillar-like legs"). These gifts, says senior editor Philip Elmer-DeWitt, make Nash "a national treasure--one of the few who can see the cutting edge of science, report it deeply, and then write about it with grace and style...
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