Word: paleobiologist
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...been mortally wounded. Thirty percent are in critical shape and may die within the next 10 to 20 years. And an additional 30% are coming under such sustained attack that they may perish by the year 2050. "I used to be reluctant to say the sky was falling," says paleobiologist Jeremy Jackson of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute near Panama City, Panama. "I'm not anymore. Today when I go for a swim on a reef in Panama...
...hour later and he might not have noticed the rock, much less stooped to pick it up. But the early morning sunlight slanting across the Namibian desert in southwestern Africa happened to illuminate momentarily some strange squiggles on a chunk of sandstone. At first Douglas Erwin, a paleobiologist at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, wondered if the meandering markings might be dried-up curls of prehistoric sea mud. But no, he decided after studying the patterns for a while, these were burrows carved by a small, wormlike creature that arose in long-vanished subtropical seas - an archaic organism that...
...explore this critical time interval have been hampered. For this reason, no one knows quite what to make of the singular frond-shape organisms that appeared tens of millions of years before the beginning of the Cambrian, then seemingly died out. Are these puzzling life-forms - which Yale University paleobiologist Adolf Seilacher dubbed the "vendobionts" - linked somehow to the creatures that appeared later on, or do they represent a totally separate chapter in the history of life...
...Smithsonian paleobiologist Douglas Erwin warned his colleagues last week, it is dangerous to try to explain a complex calamity like the Permian extinction in simplistic terms. The Great Dying, Erwin believes, was produced by an interplay of many forces--"a tangled web rather than a single mechanism"--and if paleontologists and geologists want to sort out the puzzle, they must spend long hours in the field searching for further clues. Even after scientists reach a consensus about what caused the extinction, observes Renne, a central mystery will remain. What is it about life, he marvels, that enables it to rebound...
...Hayes points out that scientific journals which have experimented with difficulty and specificity in their articles have seen a dramatic rise in subscriptions when articles are made less complex and of more general interest. And books by Wilson and world-renowned paleobiologist Stephen Jay Gould, professor of geology, regularly reach the bestseller lists...