Word: fossilizing
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...those Chinese New Year red balloons, but like much in China, it's spanking new. Yet relics of the past are good business here. In one of the mall's countless stores, apron-clad Zhang Lijie is chipping away the rock around a 120 million-year-old fish fossil that she plans to sell for $3. Zhang, 38, went from selling vegetables a decade ago to hawking fossils on a street corners. Now, she owns her own store, The Treasure Mansion, which stocks the fossilized remains of ancient fish, trees, plants and insects - but no dinosaurs, which are officially illegal...
...tour might come to see Ethiopia too. But scientists say that argument is wrongheaded. "People will go to Ethiopia to see Lucy, but why should they travel to Ethiopia if Lucy has come to their local museum?" says paleontologist Richard Leakey. "Sending Lucy or any other original fossil to America will bring status to second-level U.S. museums. It will do nothing for Ethiopian tourism or for science. It sets a terrible precedent. It is exploitation of the worst kind...
...fervid objection? For starters, moving Lucy will undoubtedly injure her. No matter how carefully she is handled, scientists say, the bones will invariably be damaged, if only microscopically. "This iconic fossil is a unique biological specimen that should never be placed at risk: travel, packing, unpacking and handling exposes the skeleton to dangers that are unacceptable," says Leakey. "The decision to send Lucy on tour to the U.S. and perhaps elsewhere is to be deplored by any right-minded person." Researchers also argue that risking an original, one-of-a-kind artifact is senseless, especially when a replica could...
...York City's American Museum of Natural History, agrees that the Houston exhibit has value. "You can make the same intellectual point with replicas, but I don't think you can make the same emotional point," says Tattersall, who is currently working on a comprehensive document of the human fossil record. "The original fossils have a presence that casts just don't have...
...they're seeing more and more patients with eco-anxious symptoms. Sufferers feel depression, hopelessness and insomnia, and go through sudden, uncontrollable bouts of sobbing. They're overwrought about where the polar bears will live if they lose their habitat. They fret about the Earth running out of fossil fuels and about the slow disappearance of the oceans' coral reefs. Sometimes, the worry is closer to home, about the loss of songbirds in the backyard or the fate of the squirrels after a neighborhood park was bulldozed for condominiums...