Word: ostrom
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...skull and bone does not settle such lingering questions a what killed off the dinosaurs 65 million years ago and whether they were warm blooded or cold. Yet even the most trivia news from the dinosaur world seems to hold everybody in thrall. Adds Yale Pale ontologist John Ostrom: ''It's good busines for the museum and for Yale...
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...
When he examined the specimen under a microscope, Ostrom noticed a feature on "Archy" that had not been preserved on the three other known Archaeopteryx fossils. It was the faint imprint of a horny sheath-or fingernail-like covering-on the three claws protruding from each of the wings of these ancient birds. Resembling the talons of a contemporary eagle, these razor-sharp, miniature scythes were obviously better suited for catching and slicing up prey than for scampering up the trunks of trees. Thus, Ostrom suggests, Archaeopteryx's lizard-like forebears probably launched themselves into the air from...
...years, no one made any effort to recover the missing bones, and the location of the bridge was eventually forgotten. But in 1967, when Yale Paleontologist John H. Ostrom learned that a new highway was being built through Manchester, he decided to revive the search. After surveying more than 60 bridges in the Manchester area, he ultimately narrowed the hunt to a single 40-ft. span across a small brook on the outskirts of town. Last summer, when the highway builders decided that the old bridge's time had come. Ostrom and his scientific team were ready...
...They hosed and washed more than 300 suspect stones, chipped at them with hammer and chisel and then examined every square inch of visible surface. By the second day, they had found two large blocks, weighing about 500 Ibs. each, that showed distinct fossil markings. Back in New Haven, Ostrom made precise measurements. Though the fossil bones still must be carefully removed from their brownstone encasement. Ostrom is now convinced that the long search is over. One of the visible bones, he says, is an almost sure match to half of an Ammosaurus thigh bone recovered by Marsh 85 years...