Word: fossils
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...Creaser is entitled to feel hopeful as he takes aim. As fossil deposits go, Riversleigh is like a golf course where you can't help but shoot sub-par. Bones abound: even the untrained eye can spot them protruding from the gray limestone outcrops. In an area of 40 sq. km, Archer's teams have found and named hundreds of sites since 1976, when he and palaeontologist Henk Godthelp decided to check out reports that Riversleigh - then a cattle station, now part of Lawn Hill National Park - might contain valuable fossils. And it did - in the same way that...
...Other tasks fall mostly to the women - Hand, Price and Ph.D. student Karen Roberts, whose father is a high-school geology teacher. Between them, they brush rocks, sort and label them, and treat fossils with a preservative. Everyone lugs rock-filled hessian bags to a pick-up point, from where they're eventually trucked to laboratories in Sydney and at Mount Isa's Riversleigh Fossil Centre. There, resident palaeontologist John Scanlon frees the bones by dissolving the surrounding limestone in dilute acetic acid. Since the vats were installed earlier this year, "I've just been hooked," says Scanlon...
...also with salt, another crucial but not always available part of the diet--goes back millions of years. But humanity's appetite for animal fat and protein is probably more recent. It was some 2.5 million years ago that our hominid ancestors developed a taste for meat. The fossil record shows that the human brain became markedly bigger and more complex about the same time. And indeed, according to Katherine Milton, an anthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley, "the incorporation of animal matter into the diet played an absolutely essential role in human evolution...
...Here at the College, 90 percent of our energy comes from fossil fuel,” she said...
...environmental protection are incompatible. The Earth Institute's approach is to bring together scientists, economists and policy makers to find the best developmental paths. For example, institute researchers will work on techniques that industries can use to slow down climate change by storing underground the carbon released from fossil fuels rather than letting it escape into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide...