Word: fossilizing
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...dark of the moon as additional reasons for mutations. Soon we'll be back in the Middle Ages. Surely one question would be, Has this happened to other aquatic life? If not, why just frogs? I can tell you that abnormalities have occurred in humans forever. Look at the fossil records. DONALD BRADLEY Plainfield, New Hampshire
...whole cast was strong, a few were especially worthy of note. Harvard alum Jon Matthews '84 played a slyly naive New York journalist, with a humor and style that is often believable, though sometimes overdone. John Randolph, of Prizzi's Honor fame, brilliantly portrayed an "authentic," folksy political fossil who "holds court" with wry witticisms and hackneyed observations. Finally, Richard Kind of TV's Spin City and Samantha Bennett colorfully reflected the vanity, insecurity and ambition that consume the reporters and their reporting...
...good. The trouble starts when scientists try to extrapolate patterns of behavior and locomotion from the fossil evidence. At last week's meeting, for example, scientists debated whether pterosaurs walked on two legs, like birds, or crawled on all fours, like bats. Hundreds of footprints discovered at dozens of sites in the U.S. and Europe over the past few years, argues Martin Lockley of the University of Colorado at Denver, strongly support the latter conclusion. The pattern of these footprints, which range in size from 1 in. to 5 in., suggests that pterosaurs held their bodies in a semierect position...
What researchers don't know about pterosaurs still far outweighs what they do know, but at least some of the dark corners of pterosaur life are beginning to divulge their secrets. A group of fossils discovered in Chile, for example, hints that pterosaurs may have nested in colonies. Some pterosaurs, like some birds, were crowned with dramatic crests that probably played a role in sexual display. But reconstructing their lost world is made difficult by the vagaries of fossil preservation and by the fact that these winged reptiles were evolutionary dead ends and left no descendants. Pterosaurs, for this reason...
Modern reef-building corals are descendants of organisms that first appeared in the fossil record 225 million years ago. These ancient carnivores, cousins of sea anemones and jellyfish, boast stinging cells and tentacles for stunning and capturing prey. But while corals have survived the onset of major ice ages and variations in sea level of hundreds of feet, there are limits to the conditions they can tolerate. For example, they cannot build reefs in water colder than 60[degrees] F or in murky depths. They live in symbiotic relationships with colonies of tiny algae called zooxanthellae that depend...