Word: fossilizing
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Carrying his speculations one step further, Green suggests that if life or its fossil remnants are found anywhere on the moon, it will probably be in the vicinity of the telltale black spots on his moon photographs. In the water released from hydrous rock by volcanic heat, he speculates, a primitive form of life might have evolved...
Died. James L. B. Smith, 70, ichthyologist who first identified the coelacanth, a fish believed extinct for 70 million years; by his own hand (cyanide); in Grahamstown, South Africa. Until 1938, when a coelacanth was caught off the South African coast, scientists had seen it only in fossil form, a five-foot-long creature whose weird, leglike fins marked it a close relative of the amphibians that first linked sea and land animals. In the years since, a dozen coelacanths have been found, though Smith never realized his dream of studying one alive. His suicide did not surprise his wife...
...Cold-Blooded. Assuming that the variation had been similar in prehistoric animals, Ho turned to late Pleistocene epoch (10,000 to 200,000 years ago) fossil remains containing well-preserved collagen. Chemically analyzing the collagen in fossil specimens recovered from Los Angeles' famed La Brea tar pits, he applied his formula and calculated the temperatures of such extinct species as the browsing ground sloth, the dire wolf, the short-faced bear and the saber-toothed...
Without exception, he found that his estimates of body temperatures of the fossil animals were within 3% of the normal temperatures of their modern descendants. The estimated temperature of the browsing ground sloth, for example, was about 96° F., only two degrees above the temperature of its modern contemporary, the two-toed sloth...
...plans to turn his attention to cold-blooded fossil animals, whose temperatures, unlike those of warmblooded creatures, varied with climatic changes. By using his collagen method to take their body temperatures, he believes, he can determine the approximate temperature of the prehistoric climate in which they lived...