Word: fossilized
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Growing up in Shelby, Mont., Horner collected his first dinosaur fossil at the age of eight, and he set out in high school to become either a paleontologist or the next Wernher Von Braun. His schoolwork was wretched, but he excelled at science projects. One, presented to a small group of bored adults at the local airport, was an experiment to track the flight of a homemade rocket. It went up 15,000 ft. at a velocity of 800 m.p.h., and the memory of his gaping elders still gratifies Horner, who scraped through high school with a D average...
...latter cause, Horner heads out each day with his fossil hunter's pick in one hand and a cigarette in the other. The hillsides are pocked with deep sinkholes and covered with bentonite, a loose mudstone that gives the sensation of walking on popcorn. When Horner slips, he drives the pick in up to its haft and hangs on as it plows a neat furrow 30 feet down a hillside without catching on anything solid. If this were an Indiana Jones movie, he would smash into something wonderful at the bottom -- the skull of a Pachycephalosaurus, say. In real life...
...mechanic's gasket scraper, then sweeps off the debris with a whisk broom. A visitor asks what he has found. "I haven't got a clue," he says, wrapping the pieces of bone in toilet paper. "That's why I'm taking it." Elsewhere he stops at an unusual fossil spotted the night before by a graduate student out fishing, who excavated it part way with a daredevil spoon intended for catching bass, not dinosaurs. "It's a metatarsal," Horner says, completing the job. "Ornithomimid. And a darn nice one at that...
...while fossil hunting with his father in Montana's Two Medicine formation, Horner picked up a rock that resembled a squashed turtle. It turned out to be one of the first intact dinosaur eggs ever found in the western hemisphere, and Horner's work at Princeton thus came to focus on one of paleontology's great mysteries: the almost complete absence of juvenile dinosaurs, especially babies, from the fossil record. He went back to Montana the following summer, with the idea of spending his vacation searching for babies in some likely shales, in the company of a beer-drinking, fossil...
...cloudy days, a solar car would have to carry sufficient power to make the trip on batteries alone. Better to charge the car from a wall socket and use the solar cells elsewhere -- perhaps at power stations to ease the load of generators running on nuclear or nonrenewable fossil fuels. The real value of Sunraycer, says MacCready, was that its improvements in aerodynamics, lightweight materials and motor technology made possible GM's Impact, a non-solar electric car now being readied for mass production...