Word: fossilize
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...geology became more precise, scientists determined from the fossil record that at least five great dyings--and numerous smaller events--have occurred in the past 600 million years. Among the more significant: the Cambrian disasters some 500 million years ago, when many species of segmented creatures called trilobites disappeared from the seas they once dominated; the biggest of the extinctions, the Permian cataclysm of 248 million years ago, when up to 90% of all marine species died; and the late-Cretaceous event 65 million years ago, which saw the destruction of the dinosaurs and many other groups of species, including...
...acid-rain pollution, which has long been a sore spot in U.S.-Canadian relations. Canadians charge that at least half the acid rain currently damaging their forests and destroying aquatic life in their lakes is caused by sulfur and nitrogen oxides released into the atmosphere by fossil- fuel-burning plants and smelters in the U.S. The Reagan Administration has maintained that the evidence against U.S. industry is incomplete...
...investment in South Africa. Harvard does not realize that what is crucial about American companies in South Africa is not so much how they treat their employees, but what they produce, import and invest in. What is crucial is the moral and political support they lend to that fossil of historic the most racist country on the face of this earth, South Africa...
...oilmen, they mean hefty savings in exploration costs, since fern fossils will indicate at what depths oil is likely to be found. Fern spores, very common in fossil records, are used to date the age of rocks below the earth's surface. Since scientists know that rocks of a certain age-or depth-are more likely to contain oil than others, fern-spore dating can help them decide whether to drill deeper to find...
...find initially seemed unimpressive. Kamoya Kimeu, head of Anthropologist Richard Leakey's proficient fossil collecting team, last summer discovered a hominid skull fragment that was 1½ in. square on a rocky slope above northwest Kenya's Nariokotome River. But over a month's time, the expedition crew, under the joint leadership of Leakey, director of the National Museums of Kenya, and Alan Walker, professor of cell biology and anatomy at the Johns Hopkins University medical school, began to turn up other whisky-colored skeletal pieces in the nearby sandy debris: first a rib, then a scapula...