Word: fossilizing
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...Brotherhood of Penitentes is a fossil of medieval Christianity, preserved by the isolation of village culture in the Old World and the New. Public flagellation as penance for sins was common in Europe until the Renaissance; in Spain the custom persisted and was carried into the New World when Spanish colonists began to settle the land that is now New Mexico and Colorado. First to cross the Rio Grande, in 1598, was the expedition of Don Juan Oñate, whereupon, according to one historian, "Don Juan went to a secluded spot where he cruelly scourged himself, mingling bitter tears...
...leaped from bed in a blink. In a coal seam 600 ft. under the village, a miner's torch had lighted an ancient white bone. Down in the depths Hurzeler dug farther with trembling care. Last week he ended a nine-year treasure hunt, exhumed the first complete fossil skeleton of an Oreopithecus ("mountain ape"). The age of the coal: 10 million years...
...Look at the Teeth. Oreopithecus lived in Miocene-period marshes, which are now coal areas around Grosseto, in central Italy. His first fossil bones were found in 1872, have always been labeled monkey fragments. But in 1949 Hurzeler became convinced that Oreopithecus was a higher type. For years he pored over bits of jaws and teeth at Basel Natural History Museum, where he is curator of vertebrate paleontology...
When he broached his theory in New York in 1956, he mainly cited Oreopithecus' teeth as far smaller and straighter than those found in fossil monkeys. The teeth were not foward-jutting, he said, and had no simian gap. The chin was rounded instead of pointed; the jawbone had a hole for a nerve passage which is characteristic of humans. But the evidence still seemed scanty to U.S. scientists. To expand it, Hurzeler set out 28 months ago, with backing from Manhattan's Wenner-Gren Foundation, to find an entire Oreopithecus skeleton, came to be called "keeper...
...missing link got demoted at last week's London meeting of the International Congress of Zoology. The chimp-size fossil primate Proconsul africanus, which lived in east Africa 30 million years ago, had been described as sitting in the family tree of both ape and man. Its skull, though primitive, is not conclusively apelike, so there seemed to be a good possibility that its descendants could be humans or apes or both...