Word: palmful
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...tropical shore along an inland sea, inhabited by huge flesh-eating dinosaurs. The area has thus yielded a rich supply of plant and animal fossils. Examining a specimen of the fossil under a microscope, Paleobotanist William D. Tidwell of Brigham Young University recognized the unmistakable cellular structure of the palm...
...Role. For Tidwell, that identification was startling. He knew that the fossil bed had been laid down during an age when earlier plants such as ferns and pinelike trees still dominated the earth's flora-some 50 million years before flowering plants are believed to have appeared. But palms are flowering plants, or angiosperms (from the Greek angeion, meaning container, and sperma, seed), and play the principal role in what Charles Darwin called "the great abominable mystery of biology." Angiosperms, which embrace everything from tropical palms and northern oak trees to Kentucky bluegrass and backyard rose bushes, had come...
Investigating the site themselves, Tidwell and his colleagues found two more fossilized palm logs. Near by, in the same geological formation, an oil company discovered ancient palm pollen. Other scientists, highly skeptical of the purported age of these finds, contended that they could easily have been washed down into the older sediment from higher and younger geological formations...
Original Position. While the scientists argued, Behunin discovered another important clue. This time he spotted what he thought were petrified twigs. Tidwell quickly identified them as roots of ancient palms. Furthermore, he noted that the roots were embedded in the sandstone in what was undoubtedly their original growth position. "This clinched it for us," Tidwell recalls. "There could now be no doubt that palm trees were growing in these sediments when they were being laid down and that the flowering plants had already established a foothold 150 million years...
...they are not even sure of the cause. The official diagnosis is that Fleisher's malady much resembles writer's cramp. But what started as an occasional feeling of "pins and needles" in the fingers is now a cramped condition in which the fingers curl into the palm involuntarily. In the past six months, the trouble has become so bad that Fleisher, now 42, can barely sign his name...