Word: fossils
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During the Chalk Age (60 to 150 million years ago) the air must have swarmed with all kinds of insects-but for some mysterious reason fossil evidence of Chalk Age bugs is rare almost to the point of nonexistence. Smithsonian Institution scientists were therefore delighted to receive last week two rare wing-prints lately found in 100,000,000-year-old Colorado sandstone, one of a giant leaf hopper, the other of something like a modern squash...
Declaring that this fossil discovery was the half-way point between man and his ape ancestors, de Chardin, a Catholic priest, feels that this "Peking Man" is definitely not an ape fossil but a man's. He went on to illustrate his belief by showing the tools found with the remains which point to an intelligence above any animals...
...many dubious and spurious finds whose claims have too often received a facile acceptance abroad. No one can deny that this salutary state of affairs is due almost entirely to the righteous scientific iconoclasm of one formidable veteran, Dr. Hrdlicka. The unhappy but deserved fate of previous fossil pretenders to geological antiquity in America, mostly at the hands of one executioner, has so intimidated the younger physical anthropologists of this country that their attitude toward alleged fossil Americans is typically that of the poet toward the purple...
...year 1936 has been a boom year in fossil anthropology. A quarry blast in South Africa turned up an adult skull of the same genus as the immature fossil Australopithecus found in 1924. A brain case discovered in England appeared to be older than Piltdown Man. A cranial piece dug out of a California creek, though probably not much more than 30,000 years old, looked like the oldest human relic ever found in the U. S. (TIME, Oct. 12 et seq.). Few weeks ago from the cave at Chou-Kou-Tien, whence the famed pair of skulls belonging...
...skulls found this year were buried ten feet lower than the first two, were therefore considered to be more ancient. To Dr. Weidenreich's delight, they were both mature, as indicated by the closing of the cranial sutures. The fifth skull he last week pronounced the oldest human fossil ever found, older even than Pithecanthropus erectus, the brutish ape-man of Java...