Word: fossilizing
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...Metasequoia--in remote central China. Ever since scientific journalists have squabbled as to whether Elmer D. Merrill, Arnold Professor of Botany, emeritus, or Ralph W. Chaney, professor of Paleontology at the University of California, is responsible for sending expeditions to bring back and distribute seeds from this "living fossil...
...Fossil. Few of his contemporaries won his affection, fewer still his awe. President Buchanan he labeled "Old Pennsylvania Fossil." Andrew Jackson, he noted, had done the U.S. "more harm than any man who ever lived in it. unless it may have been Tom Jefferson." Boss Tweed he crowned "His Scoundrelism...
...current Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London, Anatomist W. E. Le Gros Clark of Oxford adds new details to his theory that fossil primates (Proconsuls) found in Kenya show more manlike than apelike characteristics. They have no "simian shelf" (bony reinforcing) in the lower jaws, and their limbs suggest that they did not swing through the trees. Such ape traits were probably developed by specialization later than Proconsul's time...
Famed Chemist Urey (Nobel Prize, 1934) proved three years ago that certain fossil sea shells can be used as fossil thermometers to measure "paleotemperatures." His method takes advantage of the fact that normal oxygen contains two stable isotopes, oxygen 18 and oxygen 16, in the proportion of 1 to 500. When a sea mollusk takes up calcium carbonate (CaCO3) to build its shell, the proportions of the oxygen isotopes in it vary with the temperature of the sea water. The warmer the water the less oxygen 18 is built into the shell...
...start on the job, Dr. Urey this year went to Egypt, which was covered by the sea during both geological periods. In many parts of Egypt and Israel, the rock layers formed during the transition from the Cretaceous to the Eocene are very easy to identify. They contain few fossil shells, for life was apparently scarce at that time. But Egyptian and Israeli paleontologists have promised to send him suitable specimens from above and below the dividing line. If the climate-change theory is correct, the fossils will show that Cretaceous mollusks lived in warm water and Eocene mollusks...