Word: paleontologist
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...recently, attention has focused on blacks' supposedly longer lower legs and skinnier calves, which are said to give blacks an advantage over whites in jumping and sprinting. Most evolutionists dismiss attempts to link race and individual excellence as silly. "The differences between the races are very small," says Harvard Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, "just tiny compared to the variation within races." When specialists compared the legs of Jesse Owens and Frank Wykoff, the leading black and white sprinters of the 1930s, they discovered that Owens' calf muscles more closely resembled the presumed white model, while Wykoff's were...
...when she was six. Spiritually restless, she converted to Roman Catholicism, then abandoned the faith. Her social relations were equally unstable. She was involved in many liaisons and underwent an abortion, but no man held her interest for long. Fossey's career was given the best possible start when Paleontologist Louis Leakey signed her on as his research assistant, yet she was never fully confident of her talent or of those around her. In the field or at home, professional and sexual jealousies continued to mar her career. Occasionally she would make intense declarations of affection, but from the moment...
...truth is more unlikely than the tales. To beguile his off-hours, a young British physician invents a new kind of detective, a "thinking machine" who reconstructs a crime from minutiae much as a paleontologist builds a dinosaur from fossilized toes. The sleuth is accompanied by a general practitioner who respectfully annotates each case. Almost overnight the pair rise from obscurity to international renown. In an attempt to get on with "serious" works about history and spiritualism, the author decides to murder his invention by dropping him from a precipice. But the detective refuses to die. By public demand...
...light on nesting habits of the prehistoric beasts. Most dinosaurs, like modern reptiles, probably laid eggs, even though few nests have ever been unearthed. Young argues that the reptiles sought out isolated sites and used them repeatedly. Reason: he found shells in at least six layers of nests. Says Paleontologist Harley Armstrong of the Museum of Western Colorado: "This is a great detective story...
...colleagues are more cautious about Protoavis' perch in the evolutionary tree, but most agree that it is a significant find. "It's hard not to make a bird out of it," says Paleontologist Nicholas Hotton III of the Smithsonian Institution. But he is reluctant to render a final verdict. If additional Protoavis specimens bolster Chatterjee's interpretation, it would indicate that birds appeared and diversified much earlier than scientists had believed. "Paleontology is like dealing with a 10,000-piece jigsaw puzzle for which you only have 15," says Ostrom. "This fossil gives you another 15 or 20 pieces...