Word: fossils
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Till Brown of Calaveras brought a lot of fossil bones...
Manhattan's great American Museum of Natural History has rented a bank in an unnamed inland spot to store its choicer small fossils, a collection of rare Brazilian birds, type specimens of a pygmy elephant, a West African crocodile, etc. The Museum's dinosaur collection, world's best, is not being hurried to safety. "The dinosaurs have already withstood a 200,000,000 year blackout," said a fossil expert, "and they ought to survive the war. Besides, if they are bombed, it might be fun putting them back together again...
...Totally unlike anything hitherto dreamed of in U.S. art, they somewhat resembled the wiry expressionist fantasies of famed Swiss Painter Paul Klee (TIME, Oct. 21,1940). Hopping about an ornithological fairyland, or standing gravely among heaps of what looked like luminous spaghetti, Painter Graves's fossil-like birds were painted with the delicacy of Chinese landscapes...
...geology's oddest puzzles an odd solution was last week suggested. The puzzle was the origin of "devil's corkscrews," which are fossils six to eight feet high, spiral in shape, with whorls eight inches to three feet in diameter. Buried vertically, they are found in Nebraska's Sioux County in Miocene deposits 15-to 30,000,000 years old. Moreover, fossil beavers have been found in several of the fossil corkscrews, in which microscopic study shows an abundance of petrified plant cells. So two theories arose...
...there evergreens in the South, oaks in the North? Botanist William Spinner Cooper of the University of Minnesota studied fossil tree pollens in peat, concluded that "in America the climate following the glacial epoch was warm and dry, with a return to a cooler moister climate during the last few thousand years." Thus the cone-bearing evergreens of the Southern U.S. are relics of the glacial invasion (which halted at the Ohio River), and the North's oaks and other hardwoods are relics of the warm postglacial period...