Word: fossilizing
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...poor, mildewed old fossil," Mark Twain called the Smithsonian Institution. He was wrong: in 1869, when the great author let fly at it, the Smithsonian, founded 23 years before, only seemed old. But the museum doggedly proceeded to fossilize itself with quaint, dutiful and embarrassing exhibits. Into its red brick neo-Romanesque castle on the edge of the Mall in Washington, D.C., went the Lord's Prayer, engraved in the space of a needle's eye, a necklace made of human fingers, and a pair of Thomas Jefferson's leather britches. Civil War General Phil Sheridan...
...with Dorothy Osgood, his assistant, Alan K. Graham, a research fellow in Biology, and Graham's wife. The group intended to college rock core samples which had been taken from Lake Gatun by the Panama Canal Company as part of a geological study. Barghoorn hoped to recover fossil pollens from the rock samples...
...utilize "the three-quarters of the world that is water." He has projected service stations anchored to the sea bottom for submarines to nestle up to. "It is well known that below 40 feet, turbulence is manageable." he says. He proposes that the automobile may be the next fossil. "We will put little jet wings on our backs and fly out the window on high-frequency beams." Divining that the compression and tension factors can be separated in any structure, he has designed a "tensegrity mast" that seems to be held up by nothing at all. But Fuller insists that...
...archaeologist, I appreciate the publicity your cover article gave the field, but as a practicing pollen analyst, I feel obliged to admonish your Science editor for his reference to "fossilized grains of pollen." The connotation of this statement is that pollen grains become petrified with time, as the remains of a fossilized plant or animal, and so are preserved as stone. One of the wonders of biology is that the exterior surface of most types of pollen grains is amazingly resistant to chemical action. For millions of years, pollen which has avoided destruction by becoming buried retains its original organic...
...Webster's says fossilized means "converted into a fossil," which is "any trace of an animal or plant preserved in the earth's crust...