Word: fossilizes
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...lucky thing for anthropology that Dr. Ales Hrdlicka (pronounced ah-leesh hurd-leech-ka), famed fossil man of the Smithsonian Institution, was in Moscow last week. A young Soviet archeologist named A. P. Okladnikoff announced the discovery of a fossilized Neanderthal skeleton on a high cliff in "Middle Asia." The bones were those of a child eight or nine years...
...years ago when the only land animals were amphibians, and which was widespread and flourishing when the Age of Reptiles was just getting under way. The family has been considered extinct for 50,000,000 years because that is the most recent date assigned to any Coelacanth fossil found in the rocks. Thus the discovery of a live Coelacanth in the world of airplanes and television is as surprising, from an anatomical and evolutionary point of view, as would be that of a pterodactyl or diplodocus...
...coming to light of this "living fossil" creates an evolutionary mystery. In logic its kind should have disappeared when the seas began to be thronged with more modern, more efficient rivals. A plausible theory is that the Coelacanths retreated to the deeps where competition was not severe, and persisted there as the archaic okapi survived in the dense Congo forests, as the primitive duck-billed platypus in benign Australia. If so, some whim or freak of circumstance brought this particular Coelacanth up from the deeps to the coastal water of South Africa. And the possibility remains that other "living fossils...
...exact dividing line between humans and apes is almost nonexistent. Pithecanthropus erectus, the Javanese oldster regarded by most authorities as a very apish man, is called an apeman. In the past two years Dr. Robert Broom of Pretoria's Transvaal Museum has found in South Africa the fossil remains of two very manlike apes which have been called man-apes...
...South African teeth, Dr. Gregory also found connections with Peking Man, the orangutan, and Sivapithecus, a manlike fossil ape discovered many years ago in India. The geological character of the ground, however, indicated that Dr. Broom's creatures lived relatively late in the Glacial Age, by which time definitely human types such as Peking Man, Piltdown Man and Heidelberg Man had already appeared. Plesianthropus and Paranthropus thus appeared as laggard survivors of a much earlier evolutionary spurt-"conservative cousins of man," says Dr. Gregory, "and progressive cousins of the modern apes...