Word: fossil
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Dates: during 1930-1930
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...Arizona. Last year Barnum Brown of the American Museum of Natural History (Manhattan) found the shattered fragments of a fossil reptile in Arizona. He carefully preserved each piece. But when he tried to put his little 3-ft. reptile together, he found many of the fragments missing. He recognized the fossil as the remains of an ancestor of the ancient dinosaur. This year he went to Arizona again, sifted 15 tons of dirt through fly screens. Fortnight ago he returned to Manhattan with a cigar box half-full of bits to complete his paleontologic jigsaw puzzle. The small reptile which...
...thorax. Smallest insects are 1/100 in. long, scarcely discernible to the human eye. There is a chunky beetle (Macrodontia cervicovnis) 6 in. long, and some stick-insects reach 13-in. in length. Insect with the greatest wingspread is the moth Erebus agrippina, spread 11 in. But a fossil dragon fly had a 2-ft. spread...
When an animal dies, the possibility of his becoming a fossil occurs only if he is buried shortly after death or possibly at the time of death. In this event the body does not have a chance to rot, but is pressed unharmed into a rock layer. The dense nature of the rock strata in this quarry is of advantage in that water is prevented from seeping through and hence rotting away the tiny remains...
...Fossils. Notable among the Manhattan Press meetings was the congress of Fossils. Founded at the Centennial Exposition in 1876, the Fossils were originally titled the National Amateur Press Association, were 1,400 strong. As Fossils, this year's was the 27th annual reunion. Members fore-gathered in lower Manhattan at the Fossil Library, where musty walls and showcases are filled with nearly 40,000 amateur newspapers, clippings, photographs, relics. With the advent of the linotype, Fossils regretfully remember, boy-edited journalism gradually passed away. Membership in the organization is gained by presenting a copy of a nonprofessional, personally published paper...
...resources, number and distribution of population, are in constant state of flux, so that the economist's task is never done. His materials must ever be collected anew, and his work ever repeated; the economic order changes, and the living specimens of today become in a few years the fossil remains of a bygone age. We are speaking, it will be noted, not of changes in theories but of mutations in the phenomena with which theories deal in no field, probably, does the scientist have to deal with phenomena that change so generally and rapidly as in that...