Word: fossilizing
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...Dick Tracy of the Mesozoic Age. No matter how softly dinosaurs trod millions of years ago, Dr. Edwin H. Colbert, curator of fossil reptiles of Manhattan's American Museum of Natural History and professor of paleontology at Columbia University, tracks them down and digs out their bones from under the rock layers that hide them. But one dinosaur had always eluded him: the coelophysis, diminutive (3 ft. high, 6 ft. long) but impressive granddaddy of Tyrannosaurus Rex, Brontosaurus and all the other Mesozoic monsters...
...says M. Chevalier, the mountain was much taller. Snow water from the youthful peak worked its way into the rock, gnawing wells and tunnels and vast, echoing halls in the soluble limestone. Then, as the peak itself eroded away, the channels gradually lost their water supply and became a "fossil drainage system." Another elaborate system, still rushing with water, now drains through the diminished peak...
...Fossil Punts. In Britain, where amateur archeologists rummage for everything from Piltdown Man to Saxon arrowheads, two Yorkshire brothers struck pay mud in the River Humber. Since boyhood, Ted and William Wright had scoured the country near Hull, looking for likely sites. Best bet, they decided, was a mud bank in the Humber; it ought to be full of interesting stuff washed down the river since ancient days...
Some of the "marginal tribes" have faded into legend; some have taken a bumpy ride on the tailboard of civilization, and a few still follow their ancient way of life. Ethnologists cherish them all as significant "fossil cultures." The ancestors of modern, civilized man, they believe, also passed through comparable stages many thousands of years...
Social customs among the fossil cultures have been unchanged by the progress of the rest of the world. Example: the ceremonies among some Chaco tribes when a girl reaches puberty. She cowers in a hut with a blanket over her head while long lines of older women parade around her, striking the ground with sticks, rattling bunches of deer hooves. Medicine men beat drums. Young men, masked like evil spirits, howl on the outskirts, try to break through the picket line. The coming-out party lasts a month. Then the pickets disperse; the girl throws off the blanket, takes...