Word: fossilize
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Such natural processes as volcanic eruptions, forest fires and the bacterial decomposition of organic matter produce some of the damaging acidic sulfur and nitrogen compounds. But most experts believe that the current problem is directly traceable to the burning of fossil fuels by power plants, factories and smelting operations and, to a lesser extent, auto emissions. When tall smokestacks vent their fumes, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and traces of such toxic metals as mercury and cadmium mix with water vapor in the atmosphere. Chemical reactions follow that form dilute solutions of nitric and sulfuric acids-acid rain...
...something both significant and extremely exciting." Although paleontologists often scrap as furiously over their bones as saber-toothed tigers, they do not disagree with Clark's assessment. "It's of tremendous potential," says Berkeley's F. Clark Howell, who has spent years fossil hunting in East Africa. Agrees Duke's Richard Kay: "A blockbuster...
Clark and White are a little less sure about giving the creature a species name. White will say only that it appears to be an older version of Lucy, which is perhaps the most irreverent appellation ever bestowed upon an important fossil. (The name was inspired by the Beatles' song Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, which the scientists were playing on a tape recorder the night of the find.) White, in any case, has every reason to be cautious. In 1979 he and the leader of the Lucy expedition, Anthropologist Donald Johanson, touched off a major anthropological controversy...
...years' examination of the fossil have confirmed that ramapithecus--traditionally thought to be the ancestor of human beings--is really the evolutionary father of the orangutan. The discovery leaves a 14-million-year gap in knowledge about man's lineage...
...billion or so years ago. DNA molecules lead to bacteria, which in turn are transformed into protozoans. Over hundreds of millions of years, the oceans begin to swarm with increasingly complicated forms of life. The records from those days are scanty at best, and, to the layman, one fossil looks much like another. There may be books in running brooks and sermons in stones, but they do not translate very well into...