Word: paleontologist
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Working with bits of bone, fossilized impressions in stone and educated intuition, scientists have cleverly deduced the appearance, weight, speed and even habits of animals that have long been extinct. Now, University of Arizona Paleontologist-Biochemist Tong-yun Ho has gained an unexpected new insight into the metabolism of many of these extinct animals. He has learned to take their temperature...
...Paleontologist Ho depends on neither time travel nor thermometers for measuring ancient body temperatures. Instead, he works with collagen, a protein found in human and animal connective tissue and skeletal structures. Aware that the proportion of an imino acid, hydroxyproline, is lower in the collagen of cold-water fish than in fish that swim in warmer waters, Ho reasoned that the composition of collagen in warm-blooded animals might vary with their body temperatures...
...Paleontologist Ho's findings have already led him to the conclusion that Pleistocene mammals did not have substantially higher body temperatures-as many scientists believed-to protect them against the cold...
...Three months after Siegel's discovery, Harvard Paleontologist Elso S. Barghoorn reported that he had found 2-billion-year-old microfossils near Kakabeka Falls in western Ontario. Among them were a number of fossils that bore no resemblance to any living organism. One was an elaborate structure that Barghoorn named Kakabekia umbellata. When Siegel saw a photograph of Kakabekia, he exclaimed: "I've seen that thing before." Indeed, some specimens of Barghoorn's fossil and Siegel's living organism were remarkably similar. "When photographs of the two were compared," says Karen Roberts, one of Siegel...
Egyptian Diggings. Although he is currently raising funds to finance future diggings in Kenya, Leakey feels that he has little chance of finding the common ancestor of both man and the apes-a creature he believes may have lived some 40 million years ago, in the Oligocene epoch. Yale Paleontologist Elwyn Simons is working in Egypt's Fayum province, Leakey notes, an area rich in material from the Oligocene. His somewhat sad prediction: "He will be the man who gets the common link...