Word: paleontologist
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...came to David Fox in a rush one day last summer. The University of Minnesota paleontologist had become so irritated with all the White House talk about a pre-emptive war that he decided to type a manifesto decrying it. He figured the campus paper would publish his four-page, single-spaced letter, which he first e-mailed to a few colleagues to get a few signatures. Within days he had 230. When the petition grew too large for the paper's letters section, Fox and his friends paid $900 to publish the letter as an ad. Soon...
...coming up empty. I looked into this whole bygone civilization business a few years ago when doing researches for what became, in 1999, a Simon & Schuster book titled Atlantis Rising: The True Story of a Submerged Land, Yesterday and Today. I talked to scientists from the recently deceased paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould to the great naturalist Bil Gilbert. I investigated the old hoo-hah espoused by such as Ignatius Donnelly, Jules V erne and Arthur Conan Doyle, and looked into the sounder theories of bygone thinkers such as Rachel Carson and J.V. Luce. I developed a Deep Throat source...
Although the Chad fossil find is indeed important, as a paleontologist I can assure you I am not scrambling to digest its implications. The traits that Toumai exhibits are what may be expected in a 7 million-year-old ape inhabiting woodlands whose origin predates the human-African ape divergence. The fossil record is far too complete for any one single ape fossil to jar the expectations of any serious paleontologist. ESTEBAN E. SARMIENTO Department of Vertebrate Biology American Museum of Natural History New York City...
...hunting in the hot, wind-scoured desert of central Africa, an international team of researchers has uncovered one of the most sensational fossil finds in living memory: the well-preserved skull of a chimp-size animal, probably a male, that doesn't fit any known species. According to paleontologist Michel Brunet of the University of Poitiers in France, whose team reported the find in Nature last week, there is no way it could have been an ape of any kind. It was almost certainly a hominid--a member of a subdivision of the primate family whose only living representative...
...maybe all these learned experts are barking up the wrong evolutionary tree after all. At least one equally eminent paleontologist, Tim White of the University of California, Berkeley, disputes the assertion that Toumai derails the standard evolutionary family tree, let alone plants a bush in its place. The discovery is a tremendous accomplishment, he says. "This fossil is the closest we've got to the common ancestor. But dentally, it's just like Ardipithecus, except for a few minor characteristics." The mix of primitive and more advanced traits leaves him similarly unimpressed, since such mixing has been seen in various...