Word: fossils
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Offering an opportunity to four or five students who have already taken Geology 1, a fossil collecting party is being formed by the Museum of Comparative Zoology. The object of the trip is to collect fossil vertebrates in the rich Eocene deposits of southwestern Wyoming and northeastern Utah...
California. Fossils of two extinct species were found for the first time on the Pacific slope. One, announced by Dr. Chester Stock of Caltech, was a titanothere -a vegetarian mammal of 30,000,000 years ago, larger than an Indian elephant, which grew a preposterously thick and spreading horn from its snout and browsed with its lips because its front teeth were useless. The other fossil was the skull of a 20-ft. whale which 15,000,000 years ago had a three-foot beak. It was discovered by University of California undergraduates while doing field work in entomology...
...From Vadnagar, India, north of Bombay, last week flashed exciting words. "Experts in anthropology" announced that they had found fossil remains of a pygmy man 15 in. tall, a pygmy cow 18 in. high. The Press earnestly began gathering learned speculations on this "cradleland of the human race." But when the backwash of inquiries engulfed the town of Vadnagar, local authorities called the story a hoax, either the work of a practical joker or, as the Associated Press found, "the result of an old Hindu superstition that spreading a false rumor sometimes aids toward solving a domestic problem...
...eggs found in the Gobi Desert by Roy Chapman Andrews. They were the earliest eggs known to Science until the return of Harvard's latest expedition from the Permian Red Beds of north central Texas. From that ancient ground Diggers Theodore White and Llewellyn Price plucked a rust-colored fossil egg, three inches long, which they estimated to be 225,000,000 years old. All evidence indicated that the egg was laid by Ophiacodon, a six-foot reptile with ponderous head and meagre limbs. Last week Harvard announced that the world's senior egg is now on exhibition...
Manitoba. First discovery of a mosasaur skull was made in 1780 by quarrymen near Maestrict, Holland. The fossil started a lawsuit, attained such fame that a French general attacking Maestrict ordered his gunners not to molest the house containing it. Cruising the shallow seas of the Chalk Age (60-100 million years ago), the mosasaurs, though true reptiles, were completely aquatic. Their legs had become flippers. They had formidably toothed mouths which a specially jointed lower jaw enabled them to open very wide. The smallest species was eight feet long, the largest more than 40. The big ones could swallow...