Word: fossilizing
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...should the layman be interested in so esoteric a subject as evolutionary biology? It is a question that Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould has heard before. But as he sits in his cluttered office, amid the assorted books, charts and fossil remains that are the very sinew of his profession, he smiles tolerantly. "Why?" he asks. "Because it tells us where we came from, how we got here, and perhaps where we are going. Quite simply, it is science's version of Roots, except it is the story...
...notes, "small items with big implications are my bread and butter." A confessed iconoclast, he likes nothing better than to take aim at major targets. Gould links that saintly man of the cloth and science, Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, to the infamous Piltdown hoax (the faked fossil, says Gould, was apparently a youthful prank by Teilhard), and displays irreverence for even his great hero Charles Darwin. Says Gould: "If I have one special ability, it is as a tangential thinker. I can make unusual connections...
Such natural processes as volcanic eruptions, forest fires and the bacterial decomposition of organic matter produce some of the damaging acidic sulfur and nitrogen compounds. But most experts believe that the current problem is directly traceable to the burning of fossil fuels by power plants, factories and smelting operations and, to a lesser extent, auto emissions. When tall smokestacks vent their fumes, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and traces of such toxic metals as mercury and cadmium mix with water vapor in the atmosphere. Chemical reactions follow that form dilute solutions of nitric and sulfuric acids-acid rain...
...million in 1983. It is the only area outside the defense budget where an increase is planned. The money is beginning to produce results. New research in the U.S. and West Germany strongly suggests that acid rain combines with traces of toxic metals emitted into the atmosphere by fossil fuel-burning plants to leach away nutrients that sustain trees. In addition, scientists believe the mixture of acid rain and aluminum trace elements in the soil is absorbed by roots and can choke off a tree's water supply...
Clark and White are a little less sure about giving the creature a species name. White will say only that it appears to be an older version of Lucy, which is perhaps the most irreverent appellation ever bestowed upon an important fossil. (The name was inspired by the Beatles' song Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, which the scientists were playing on a tape recorder the night of the find.) White, in any case, has every reason to be cautious. In 1979 he and the leader of the Lucy expedition, Anthropologist Donald Johanson, touched off a major anthropological controversy...