Word: fossilizing
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Last week at Manhattan's famed American Museum of Natural History. Alfred and two friends-Joseph Geiler, 16. and Michael Bandrowski, 16-exhibited the fossil of a winged reptile, oldest airborne vertebrate known to man. Siefker's protorosaur, said Dr. Edwin H. Colbert, head of the museum's department of vertebrate paleontology, "proves that vertebrates attempted flight some 10 million years earlier than anyone suspected...
...Deal. Alfred's fossil hunting began when he was only 13, when he hiked to the abandoned Granton quarry in North Bergen, a mile from his home. Friends showed him the remains of ancient fish in a layer of fine-grained black shale and Alfred became a paleontologist on the spot. He spent most of his spare time in the old quarry. At night he pored over books on his new hobby. Soon he had an impressive fossil collection, mostly of primitive fish, such as coelacanths, which he took to the Museum of Natural History...
...months before. A large area was being leveled for the construction of a supermarket, and Alfred led his small but expert crew to a place where shale lay near the surface. They dug down to the dark rock and brought big slabs to the surface. They found some coelacanth fossils first but ignored them as commonplace. Then they split another slab, and Alfred knew at once that they had come upon something extraordinary. In the shale was the 7½in. skeleton of a delicate creature that looked like a cross between a lizard and a monstrous dragonfly. The boys...
...accurately; it formed as silt on the bottom of the great lake that covered the Jersey meadows 175 million years ago. In that dim age, the famous flying reptiles, the pterosaurs, had not yet evolved. Yet here was a reptile equipped with something like wings. Dr. Colbert took the fossil to the laboratory, where skilled technicians spent months clearing shale from around the delicate bones...
...veteran Olduvai Fossil-Hunter Louis S. B. Leakey. 57. reports that he and his family last year discovered what he calls, using a phrase familiar among anthropologists, "earliest man." Leakey's earliest man is described as more than 600,000 years old. or some 100,000 years older than the Peking man or Java man. Says Leakey, a broad, rumpled, sometime Cambridge don: "My 19-year-old son Jonathan wandered across a slope during a pause in our other work at Olduvai and picked up a small fragment of animal jaw. 'You've got a saber-toothed...