Word: shale
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...Weird Wonders Inside locked cabinets at the Smithsonian Institution nestle snapshots in stone as vivid as any photograph. There, engraved on slices of ink-black shale, are the myriad inhabitants of a vanished world, from plump Aysheaia prancing on caterpillar-like legs to crafty Ottoia, lurking in a burrow and extending its predatory proboscis. Excavated in the early 1900s from a geological formation in the Canadian Rockies known as the Burgess Shale, these relics of the earliest animals to appear on earth are now revered as priceless treasures. Yet for half a century after their discovery, the Burgess Shale fossils...
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...
...Star Trek books and the German Perry Rodan series, about a band of heroic warriors who take over the solar system, dominate his home bookcase) and, says science teacher William Eisenbeiser, devised elaborate schemes to build everything from a spaceship to a machine that would extract oil from shale. According to the Dexter Leader of April 24, 1975, Koernke won several science-fair prizes, one for a "communications antenna" that "is now being sold to nasa." Despite grades that several of his teachers recall as unspectacular, the article stated that the federal space agency had awarded him a scholarship...