Word: fossilization
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Dates: during 1940-1940
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...little balls, one-half inch to one inch in diameter. To a layman's eye they looked like dull, dirty grey or yellowish grey pebbles. Actually they are pearls-and, as pearls go, huge. Their value as jewels is zero, but they are precious to science. They are fossil pearls...
These Inoceramus pearls were found in western Kansas in 1935 by George Fryer Sternberg of Fort Hays Kansas State College. Since many other fossil pearls had been previously discovered, the college museum did not pay much attention. Recently Sternberg shipped his stony, lacklustre treasures off to the Smithsonian for an expert appraisal. The Smithsonian's crack Paleontologist Roland Brown examined them with enthusiasm, dashed off a scientific report, last week pronounced them the finest fossil pearls, for size and shape, ever collected...
Harvard has another "living fossil" and it's not a member of the faculty. A report published by Harold J. Coolidge, Assistant Curator of Mammals, in the Harvard Museum Monograph today, indicates that the specimen of a wild ox or kouprey presented to the museum last year is an entirely new genus close to the ancestral line of modern domestic cattle...
Theodore E. white, of the Museum staff, will work at the site this winter under a grant from the Milton Fund of Harvard. Several years of excavation will be required to piece together the picture of the fauna as found in the fossil bones...
...Chapman Andrews is best known as the man who discovered fossil dinosaur eggs in Mongolia's Gobi Desert. Before that, no one knew whether dinosaurs laid eggs or bore their young alive. Andrews has done a great deal of other scientific junketing, slaking an insatiable curiosity which he has had ever since he was a Wisconsin boy. Several times he has been on death's brink-once a black boy in Borneo yanked him out of range of a huge python which was about to drop on the explorer from a tree...