Word: fossils
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Eddie Carr, the specialty man, is singularly unattractive and vulgar without being funny. The brilliance of his dialogue (on the cleaner side) is shown by the persistence of the fossil about the WPA workers who were mistaken for statues...
Michigan. Fossil seaweeds have been found as old as 1,200,000,000 years. In a quarry between the north and south iron veins of the Menominee Range, a dynamite blast exposed Proterozoic seaweed which Oscar Halvorsen Reinholt, geologist and mining engineer, pronounced 1,500,000,000 years old. "The upper Michigan peninsula," said he, "now takes precedence over the section near Saratoga Springs, N. Y., as the oldest region in which life forms are known to have existed." Harvard's Peabody Museum eagerly sent for samples...
...those who agreed with Professor Dart from the first in placing Australopihecus "in or near the line by which man las arisen" was Dr. Robert Broom, paleontologist of the Transvaal Museum in retoria. Last July another blast in another limestone quarry, this time at Sterkfontein, turned up another fossil brain case. The manager, urged by Dr. Broom to keep his eyes peeled for a Taungs ape, landed this to the scientist. Feverish earch disclosed the upper face, the skull base, the right jawbone with three teeth, a detached molar. Last week in Nature appeared a letter from Dr. Broom describing...
...Broom's joy the Sterkfontein skull was that of an adult, with fairly heavy brow ridges and a brain capacity of about 600 cc. He found some resemblances to the Taungs skull and some differences, therefore put his fossil in the same genus with Australopithecus but in a different species. Name: Australopithecus transvaalensis Broom. One molar which he was able to examine closely showed close affinities to Dryopithecus, a well-known genus of extinct apes. It is from a generalized type of Dryopithecus that most anthropologists believe man evolved...
...time he wrote, Professor Broom had made no attempt to free the fossil from its rocky matrix, as the bones were brittle to the point of crumbling. When they are finally freed, complete scientific scrutiny may establish the right of Australopithecus to a place in man's evolutionary prolog. Meanwhile, says Dr. Broom, the discovery shows that "we had in South Africa in Pleistocene times large non-forest living anthropoids-not very closely allied to either the chimpanzee or the gorilla but showing a number of typical human characteristics not met with in any of the living anthropoids...