Word: shale
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...with the help of two dialect coaches, is playing Fred. "They live in a trailer that's just a pigsty." The movie will answer several burning Flintstone questions: How did blue-collar Fred win heiress Wilma Slaghoople (KRISTEN JOHNSON)? How did Barney Rubble (STEPHEN BALDWIN) meet Betty O'Shale (JANE KRAKOWSKI)? And where did Dino come from? Alas, the etymology of "Yabba-dabba doo" will remain untold...
Kate is an especially well-drawn character, neither cute nor tragic, believable as eight. As the pilgrimage falls apart, she yearns for solidity: her father, if possible, or the Grand Canyon, to which he promised to take her, and where the name of a layer of rock, Bright Angel Shale, has caught her imagination. Eventually she gets there...
Then, starting in the late 1960s, three paleontologists - Harry Whittington of the University of Cambridge in England and his two students, Derek Briggs and Simon Conway Morris - embarked on a methodical re-examination of the Burgess Shale fossils. Under bright lights and powerful microscopes, they coaxed fine-grain anatomical detail from the shale's stony secrets: the remains of small but substantial animals that were overtaken by a roaring underwater mudslide 515 million years ago and swept into water so deep and oxygen-free that the bacteria that should have decayed their tissues couldn't survive. Preserved were not just...
...there was Anomalocaris, a fearsome predator that caught its victims with spiny appendages and crushed them between jaws that closed like the shutter of a camera. "Weird wonders," Harvard University paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould called them in his 1989 book, Wonderful Life, which celebrated the strangeness of the Burgess Shale animals...
...begun importing tiny velvet worms that inhabit rotting logs in the dry forests of Australia. Blowing bubbles of spittle and waving their fat legs in the air, they look, he marvels, virtually identical to their Cambrian cousin Aysheaia, whose evocative portrait appears in the pages of the Burgess Shale. Soon Carroll hopes to answer a pivotal question: Is the genetic tool kit needed to construct a velvet worm smaller than the one the arthropods...