Word: paleontologist
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...bones belonged to an extinct primate that paleontologists call Ramapithecus (the Latin word for ape, with a bow to the Indian god Rama). Scientists already knew that the creature lived in Asia and Africa 8,000,000 to 15 million years ago. But they have never known exactly where to place him on the evolutionary ladder. Did he belong to the family of apes? Or was he already a member of the family of man? The questions puzzled Yale Paleontologist Elwyn L. Simons, and his former student, David R. Pilbeam, both of whom had strongly suspected for some time that...
...prints and commercials perforating climactic scenes-old flicks remain more compelling than most of the shows that surround them. Films may go in one era and out the other, but even the flattest Tarzan epic or the corniest war saga offers a series of clues to history. Like a paleontologist reconstructing a Brontosaurus from a vertebra and two teeth, the patient late-show viewer can reconstruct some of the main currents of American thought...
Asked by the Ohio State scientists to identify the 2½-in.-long fossil, Paleontologist Edwin Colbert, of the American Museum of Natural History, last week announced that it was a bit of jaw bone from a 3 to 4 ft. salamander-like creature that lived about 200 million years ago in the early Triassic period. It was the first evidence that land vertebrates had roamed Antarctica when its climate was warm...
...after Paleontologist Colbert's identification, the burden is on them to explain how a fresh-water amphibian swam through hundreds of miles of saltwater ocean to reach Antarctica and die at the bottom of a stream only 325 miles from the South Pole...
...crocodile-like reptile that rose without warning from the water. All that the predator left behind was the victim's head, which sank to the bottom and became embedded in the sand. In New Haven, Conn., last week, some 28 million years after this hypothetical drama, Yale Paleontologist Elwyn Simons displayed the ancient skull and reported that it belonged to the most primitive ape ever discovered-the earliest known member of man's family tree...