Word: fossils
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...tides at the closed end of the Bay of Fundy are the highest in the world, rising and falling more than 50 feet every day. For the two fossil hunters clambering over the bordering cliffs near Parrsboro, Nova Scotia, last summer, that presented a special problem. Timing their forays with the mighty ebb and flow, they often found themselves on isolated cliff faces, cut off by the surging water...
Excavations at the Nova Scotia site have so far yielded more than 100,000 fossilized bone fragments, all dating from shortly after the mass extinction some 200 million years ago that marked the end of the Triassic period and the beginning of the Jurassic. Because of some rapid change, perhaps a catastrophic event, the fossil record shows, 43% of the animal families whose fossilized remains are found in the older Triassic rock are missing from the Jurassic layers just above it. The sudden mass extinction opened the evolutionary way for the proliferation of the dinosaurs and the emergence...
Last week their remains were still being painstakingly extracted from more than three tons of the fossil-rich rock that were shipped back to laboratories at Harvard and Columbia. Technicians armed with microscopes and carbide needles to pick away at the rock have already discovered some notable specimens: the world's richest collection of fossil bones of tritheledonts, the group of reptiles most closely related to mammals; a large number of sphenodonts, small, lizard-like reptiles whose only living relative is the tuatara of New Zealand; yard-long crocodiles with spindly legs, a whiplike tail and a sleek body that...
...student of the fossil record, the author takes the long view: given world enough and time, accidents take on aspects of a plan. But does nature "know" this, or is a grand design the projection of the human brain? The relationship between quirkiness and meaning is the book's dominant theme, perhaps best appreciated in Gould's retelling of the joke about a woman shopping for a large chicken. The butcher puts a two-pounder, his last bird, on the scale. "Not big enough," says the woman. Pretending to weigh a larger one, the butcher presses his thumb...
...together, geologists have long assumed that when living organisms die, heat, light and bacteria begin to degrade the constituent compounds. That organic material then collects in sedimentary layers in the sea and is buried progressively deeper. After millions of years, pressure and temperature convert the debris into fossil fuels. Yet little hard evidence supports this conventional wisdom. Declares Tore Lindbo, Swedish Power Board coordinator of the Lake Siljan project: "It is simply a theory that is generally accepted...