Word: teethe
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...British India a generation ago, scientists unearthed two small fossils that consisted of no more than partial jawbones and a few teeth. For many years, they gathered dust-one in London's British Museum, the other in the Calcutta Museum. The ancient bones were largely ignored by professionals and the public alike. That oversight may have been one of paleontology's biggest bloopers. After carefully studying those neglected fossils, two Yale investigators have now become convinced that they are rare remnants of the first manlike creatures on earth...
...test their theories, they engaged in some shrewd scientific detective work. Not only did they go through the usual painstaking steps of precise measurement, but they also ingeniously used the tiny fragments to reconstruct the creature's habits and habitats. Teeth, in particular, lend themselves to such paleontological probing...
Almost immediately, Simons and Pilbeam noted that the jawbones lacked the large overlapping canine teeth that are characteristic of all apes. Thus, Rama could grind his food with manlike side-to-side movements. Apes, on the other hand, mostly chomp up and down on their food, since their canines prevent lateral motion of the jaws. The Yale investigators also decided that Rama's molars had emerged one after another, as in man, rather than almost simultaneously, as in apes. From this evidence they drew two important conclusions: 1) Rama probably ventured into open country to forage for tougher foods...
Ferocious Neighbors. The evidence comes, in part, from Africa's Omo River Basin, a fossil-rich area where the borders of Ethiopia, Kenya and the Sudan meet. There, a University of Chicago expedition has found 40 prehistoric teeth and two jawbones buried in volcanic ash that is perhaps 4,000,000 years old. The expedition's leader, Anthropologist F. Clark Howell, is convinced that the creatures are members of the Australopithecus family, even though they must have belonged to a branch that probably did not eat meat or make tools. Despite their proximity to various ferocious neighbors...
...buried bills of swordfish, a few of this year's crop of calf whales may survive to be 75. But most of those that escape the whalers' harpoons will succumb to what Dr. Scheffer suggests are their real enemies: "The small, erosive, unimpressive costs of living . . . broken teeth and bones, poisonous foods, and all the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir...