Word: fossilized
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Dates: during 1970-1970
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Poking through the fossil collection of The Netherlands' Teyler Museum in September, Yale Paleontologist John H. Ostrom spotted one musty specimen that looked odd to his trained eye. It was labeled pterosaur, a flying reptile that inhabited the earth from 65 to 200 million years ago. But when Ostrom held the fossil to the light, he saw the distinctly unreptilian impression of a feather. "My heartbeat began going up fast," recalls Ostrom, who quickly recognized that the specimen was not a pterosaur at all. It was, in fact, a far rarer prehistoric aviator: an Archaeopteryx (literally "ancient wing...
What makes the "newest" Archaeopteryx fossil especially significant is that it may help resolve an old scientific argument about the evolution of birds. According to the more popular theory, birds are descended from small tree-dwelling reptiles that developed crude "wings," like those of the modern flying squirrel. They used those wings for gliding round their arboreal habitats and dodging foes. The other theory says that birds evolved from ground-dwelling reptiles that grew similar membranes, helping them to take increasingly longer leaps after insects and other fast-moving prey...
...radiation is under control), Knapp declared that "there is not a single case of thermal emission seriously damaging the ecology." He particularly decried conservationists' lawsuits that block the growth of nuclear plants. Those who hinder power generation, Knapp said, only guarantee "ever darkening skies and diminishing amounts of fossil fuel resources-or an even more hazardous environmental threat, insufficient electricity to meet our nation's demand...
...first glance, the 4-ft.-long, buff-colored fossilized log that Behunin discovered seemed not at all remarkable. It lay in a countryside of desert valleys in central Utah that 150 million years ago was a lush tropical shore along an inland sea, inhabited by huge flesh-eating dinosaurs. The area has thus yielded a rich supply of plant and animal fossils. Examining a specimen of the fossil under a microscope, Paleobotanist William D. Tidwell of Brigham Young University recognized the unmistakable cellular structure of the palm...
Principal Role. For Tidwell, that identification was startling. He knew that the fossil bed had been laid down during an age when earlier plants such as ferns and pinelike trees still dominated the earth's flora-some 50 million years before flowering plants are believed to have appeared. But palms are flowering plants, or angiosperms (from the Greek angeion, meaning container, and sperma, seed), and play the principal role in what Charles Darwin called "the great abominable mystery of biology." Angiosperms, which embrace everything from tropical palms and northern oak trees to Kentucky bluegrass and backyard rose bushes...