Word: fossilizes
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...November 1924 a blast was fired in a limestone quarry near Taungs in Bechuanaland, South Africa. In the material that tumbled to the foot of the cliff were fossil fragments from a cave which the blast had exposed. The manager gathered the fossil-bearing chunks together, handed them to a Johannesburg geologist named Young who was stopping by on business. Dr. Young took them to Dr. Raymond Arthur Dart, professor of anatomy at the University of Johannesburg. Laboriously scraping away the rocky mineral, Professor Dart uncovered a small, fragmentary skull with the face almost intact. The scientist quickly realized that...
...those who agreed with Professor Dart from the first in placing Australopihecus "in or near the line by which man las arisen" was Dr. Robert Broom, paleontologist of the Transvaal Museum in retoria. Last July another blast in another limestone quarry, this time at Sterkfontein, turned up another fossil brain case. The manager, urged by Dr. Broom to keep his eyes peeled for a Taungs ape, landed this to the scientist. Feverish earch disclosed the upper face, the skull base, the right jawbone with three teeth, a detached molar. Last week in Nature appeared a letter from Dr. Broom describing...
...Broom's joy the Sterkfontein skull was that of an adult, with fairly heavy brow ridges and a brain capacity of about 600 cc. He found some resemblances to the Taungs skull and some differences, therefore put his fossil in the same genus with Australopithecus but in a different species. Name: Australopithecus transvaalensis Broom. One molar which he was able to examine closely showed close affinities to Dryopithecus, a well-known genus of extinct apes. It is from a generalized type of Dryopithecus that most anthropologists believe man evolved...
...time he wrote, Professor Broom had made no attempt to free the fossil from its rocky matrix, as the bones were brittle to the point of crumbling. When they are finally freed, complete scientific scrutiny may establish the right of Australopithecus to a place in man's evolutionary prolog. Meanwhile, says Dr. Broom, the discovery shows that "we had in South Africa in Pleistocene times large non-forest living anthropoids-not very closely allied to either the chimpanzee or the gorilla but showing a number of typical human characteristics not met with in any of the living anthropoids...
...Wyoming's Big Horn Basin one day last year a young laborer attached to a paleontological expedition from Princeton University dug out a chunk of fine-grained, greenish-grey sandstone. He could see hat this hard matrix contained fossil fragments, but the bones were so small that he tossed it aside. On second thought he picked it up again, handed it to Expedition Leader Glenn Lowell Jepsen. Red-laired, laconic Paleontologist Jepsen recognized at a glance that the fossil might be important. He cut the sandstone into three pieces, sent them to a skilled preparator named Albert Thomson...