Word: fossils
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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...
...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...
...geology became more precise, scientists determined from the fossil record that at least five great dyings--and numerous smaller events--have occurred in the past 600 million years. Among the more significant: the Cambrian disasters some 500 million years ago, when many species of segmented creatures called trilobites disappeared from the seas they once dominated; the biggest of the extinctions, the Permian cataclysm of 248 million years ago, when up to 90% of all marine species died; and the late-Cretaceous event 65 million years ago, which saw the destruction of the dinosaurs and many other groups of species, including...
...acid-rain pollution, which has long been a sore spot in U.S.-Canadian relations. Canadians charge that at least half the acid rain currently damaging their forests and destroying aquatic life in their lakes is caused by sulfur and nitrogen oxides released into the atmosphere by fossil- fuel-burning plants and smelters in the U.S. The Reagan Administration has maintained that the evidence against U.S. industry is incomplete...