Word: fossilizing
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Although the ancient hunter lacked the flexible lower jaw and other advanced features of its more ferocious descendants, the overall shape and internal structure of its bones provide strong evidence that the beast was a true dinosaur. "This fossil confirms our suspicions that dinosaurs began as small, carnivorous, bipedal animals," says Paul Sereno, an assistant professor of anatomy at Chicago and a leader of the expedition. "We are just a couple of steps away from the ancestor of all dinosaurs." The scientists named the find Eoraptor, or "dawn stealer," because it appeared at the dawn of the dinosaurs and, considering...
There hasn't even been a political trend worth mentioning -- the election signifying less a leftward trend than a rejection of the rightward trend, which has been slithering around for two decades now. As a result, we've been forced to import trends, like karaoke, or revive fossil trends like troll dolls, who first showed their wizened little rubber faces almost 30 years...
Even more to their astonishment, researchers discovered that biology played an important role in the rock-dissolving process. By poring over slices of limestone under microscopes, scientists found the fossil remains of primitive bacteria that had thrived in the once hostile environment. Using sulfur instead of sunlight as their source of energy, these organisms actually bolstered the acid's power to etch rock. Descendants of these strange microbes have recently been found and are being studied at Lechuguilla Cave, not far from Carlsbad...
...looking at fossil specimens and studying current species, researchers have concluded that most cave dwellers started out at the entrance of the cave. As they and their descendants traveled deeper inside and away from sunlight, they began to lose their eyes and develop other sensory organs to compensate. But is this loss an active process or just a question of disuse? "That's been a raging debate ever since Darwin's time," Poulson says. "What we've found is that it's disuse. There is no natural selection to screen out any bad mutations that affect the eyes. So eventually...
These varied sources would produce electricity for local consumption and clean-burning hydrogen for distribution via pipelines. According to one estimate, a single solar-cell farm covering roughly one-quarter the area of New Mexico could supply enough electrically produced hydrogen to replace all the fossil fuels consumed in the U.S. If the necessary real estate can't be found on the planet's surface, the solar collectors could be parked in orbit, beaming energy to earth via high-power microwaves...