Word: fossils
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Paleoanthropologists have not unearthed anything this revolutionary since 1974, when the famous fossil skeleton known as Lucy was discovered about 50 miles north of the current find. That 3.2 million-year-old female hominid had some human characteristics -- most notably, she walked on two legs rather than four -- but skull and tooth fragments indicated she was somewhat apelike as well. She fit nicely into the shared-ancestor theory first put forward by Charles Darwin and supported by modern comparisons between human and ape proteins and DNA. The divergence between the ape and human lines, argued the biochemists, came somewhere between...
Paleontologist Gen Suwa was walking across the pebble-covered desert of north- central Ethiopia under the searing midday sun, peering carefully around him for ancient bones. Then he saw it: the telltale gleam of a fossil tooth partially exposed on the rocky ground. "I knew immediately that it was a hominid tooth," says the University of Tokyo scientist, "and one of the oldest ever found...
...Fossil Lode in the Gobi Desert...
...joint expedition of scientists from the American Museum of Natural History and the Mongolian Academy of Sciences unveiled a trove of fossil remains uncovered last summer in the Gobi Desert. Among the scores of fossils are specimens of a turkey-size creature that resembled both dinosaurs and birds. Perhaps even more important was the discovery of 140 skulls of small mammals that lived 80 million years ago. The mammal finds may provide clues to the evolutionary events that allowed mammals to flourish as the dinosaurs disappeared...
...different theory. A. afarensis was not a single species, they say, but a group of loosely related species. If that is true, then there must have been an even older species, still undiscovered, that was ancestral to them all. The debate has been difficult to resolve, because fossil hunters have never found a key piece of evidence: an intact A. afarensis skull. Skulls are the Rosetta stones of anthropology, bearing unique features that let scientists determine whether two fossil samples come from the same type of creature...