Word: paleontologist
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Somewhere in eastern Montana, in the rolling, eroded hills known as the Hell Creek formation, paleontologist Jack Horner sips a beer and looks down at the most complete Tyrannosaurus rex ever unearthed. It lies on its left side, its neck twisted back pitiably. Horner's crew has just exposed a section of pelvic bone to its first sunset in 65 million years, and someone remarks on the redness of the bone, like smoked bacon...
Growing up in Shelby, Mont., Horner collected his first dinosaur fossil at the age of eight, and he set out in high school to become either a paleontologist or the next Wernher Von Braun. His schoolwork was wretched, but he excelled at science projects. One, presented to a small group of bored adults at the local airport, was an experiment to track the flight of a homemade rocket. It went up 15,000 ft. at a velocity of 800 m.p.h., and the memory of his gaping elders still gratifies Horner, who scraped through high school with a D average...
...unconventional paleontologist wants you to know them too. Who cares what killed them off? Horner is more interested in how they lived...
...Harvard paleontologist and author Stephen Jay Gould told nearly 700 graduates at Clark University in Worcester that nature is "massively indifferent" to their concerns--and this was cause for rejoicing...
...panelists--paleontologist Richard Leakey, the director of Kenya's Wildlife Services, and Richard Garstang of the Endangered Wildlife Trust of Southern Africa--disagreed over the role of ivory trading. While the Kenyan elephant population is dangerously low, Garstang said, elephant overpopulation in South Africa makes that government's policy of state-run population control and ivory trading an appropriate solution...