Word: fossilizing
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Paleoanthropologists have not unearthed anything this revolutionary since 1974, when the famous fossil skeleton known as Lucy was discovered about 50 miles north of the current find. That 3.2 million-year-old female hominid had some human characteristics -- most notably, she walked on two legs rather than four -- but skull and tooth fragments indicated she was somewhat apelike as well. She fit nicely into the shared-ancestor theory first put forward by Charles Darwin and supported by modern comparisons between human and ape proteins and DNA. The divergence between the ape and human lines, argued the biochemists, came somewhere between...
Paleontologist Gen Suwa was walking across the pebble-covered desert of north- central Ethiopia under the searing midday sun, peering carefully around him for ancient bones. Then he saw it: the telltale gleam of a fossil tooth partially exposed on the rocky ground. "I knew immediately that it was a hominid tooth," says the University of Tokyo scientist, "and one of the oldest ever found...
...Ethiopia next month, to the site, hoping to find parts of other skeletons and uncover more clues about the Ethiopian environment of 4.4 million years ago. Says White: "We're going to crawl on our hands and knees, looking for every giraffe, pig, bird, rodent, seed and any other fossil we can find." Humanity has just added half a million years to its heritage; perhaps the next expedition will give scientists a better idea of how much further back our line of ancestors goes...
...Fossil Lode in the Gobi Desert...
...joint expedition of scientists from the American Museum of Natural History and the Mongolian Academy of Sciences unveiled a trove of fossil remains uncovered last summer in the Gobi Desert. Among the scores of fossils are specimens of a turkey-size creature that resembled both dinosaurs and birds. Perhaps even more important was the discovery of 140 skulls of small mammals that lived 80 million years ago. The mammal finds may provide clues to the evolutionary events that allowed mammals to flourish as the dinosaurs disappeared...