Word: paleontologist
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...fall of 1884, when he heard that dinosaur remains had been discovered in a stone quarry near Manchester, Conn., Yale University's Othniel Charles Marsh, a pioneering paleontologist, rushed off to see for himself. Sure enough, there were the fossilized bones of a small (7-ft.-long) creature that was later identified as Ammosaurus major, an inhabitant of the area 200 million years ago. But Marsh was already too late. The dinosaur's front half had already been carted away; the brownstone in which the fossils were encased had been cut into blocks and cemented into...
...years, no one made any effort to recover the missing bones, and the location of the bridge was eventually forgotten. But in 1967, when Yale Paleontologist John H. Ostrom learned that a new highway was being built through Manchester, he decided to revive the search. After surveying more than 60 bridges in the Manchester area, he ultimately narrowed the hunt to a single 40-ft. span across a small brook on the outskirts of town. Last summer, when the highway builders decided that the old bridge's time had come. Ostrom and his scientific team were ready...
...bones belonged to an extinct primate that paleontologists call Ramapithecus (the Latin word for ape, with a bow to the Indian god Rama). Scientists already knew that the creature lived in Asia and Africa 8,000,000 to 15 million years ago. But they have never known exactly where to place him on the evolutionary ladder. Did he belong to the family of apes? Or was he already a member of the family of man? The questions puzzled Yale Paleontologist Elwyn L. Simons, and his former student, David R. Pilbeam, both of whom had strongly suspected for some time that...
...miles west of Kenya's Lake Rudolf, Harvard Paleontologist Bryan Patterson discovered the fragment of a jaw that he reckons is 5,000,000 years old. In roughly the same area, the University of London's William Bishop found a lone primate tooth that may be several million years older. Most tantalizing of all, jaws and teeth dating back 6,000,000 to 8,000,000 years have been uncovered in Southern Europe and mainland China...
...prints and commercials perforating climactic scenes-old flicks remain more compelling than most of the shows that surround them. Films may go in one era and out the other, but even the flattest Tarzan epic or the corniest war saga offers a series of clues to history. Like a paleontologist reconstructing a Brontosaurus from a vertebra and two teeth, the patient late-show viewer can reconstruct some of the main currents of American thought...