Word: paleontologist
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Professor of Psychology Elizabeth Spelke, paleontologist and Fisher Professor of Natural History Andrew Knoll, and evolutionary biologist Edward O. Wilson, Pellegrino university professor emeritus, were among the leaders chosen from a field of 100 by a group of distinguished scientists—including psychology professor Stephen Kosslyn—and Time editors...
...later hominids--the term scientists use to describe ourselves and our non-ape ancestors. They also differ in shape from the teeth of all known fossil and modern apes. Even the way in which the teeth had been worn down was telling. Explains Haile-Selassie's thesis adviser, Berkeley paleontologist Tim White: "Apes all sharpen their upper canines as they chew. Hominids don't." The new creature's back teeth are larger than a chimp's too, while the front teeth are narrower, suggesting that its diet included a variety of fibrous foods, rather than the fruits and soft leaves...
...Some scientists blame climate change; others finger a mega-outbreak of disease. Still others subscribe to what Australian paleontologist Tim Flannery refers to as the "black-hole theory of extinction." In this case, as Flannery wryly explains in his just published ecological history of North America, The Eternal Frontier (Atlantic Monthly Press; $27.50), the black hole lay between the nose and chin of our Stone Age ancestors...
...mystery of why nature invented feathers in the first place. For the better part of a century, biologists have assumed that these specialized structures evolved for flight, but that's clearly not true. "The feathers on these dinosaurs aren't flight-worthy, and the animals couldn't fly," says paleontologist Kevin Padian, of the University of California, Berkeley. "They're too big, and they don't have wings." So what was the original purpose of feathers? Nobody knows for sure; they might have been useful for keeping dinos dry, distracting predators or attracting mates, as peacocks do today...
...their scientific guides aboard the Russian icebreaker Yamal, it was an astonishing sight. Just as they approached the North Pole, they spotted a mile-wide hole in the ice. "It was totally unexpected," Harvard oceanographer James McCarthy, one of the scientists on board, later told the New York Times. Paleontologist Malcolm McKenna, of New York City's American Museum of Natural History, said, "I don't know if anybody in history ever got to 90[degrees] north to be greeted by water, not ice." Even more surprising, they saw ivory gulls soaring blithely overhead. The Times itself commented that...