Word: paleontologist
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...argument was not settled until a few years ago, when a physicist and amateur paleontologist at Connecticut's Wesleyan University, John Mclntosh, and the Pittsburgh museum's David Berman sorted through tons of bones, re-examined the original site descriptions and discovered the 1909 skull switch. As a result, a longer head was retrieved from the dusty storage bins and mounted atop the Carnegie's Brontosaurus. Casts were also shipped of to other institutions, which, like the Pea body, are gradually making the change...
Last week, as if to reinforce Dougal Dixon's point, a team led by Harvard Paleontologist Parish Jenkins Jr. announced a rare discovery from northeastern Arizona: a fossil jaw from a tiny, shrewlike, insect-eating mammal that lived during the early Jurassic period, 180 million years ago. At that time the first small mammals evolved from a kind of mammalian reptile. In evolutionary terms, these creatures bided their time, for 115 million years, until the disappearance of dinosaurs and other reptiles allowed them to evolve thousands of different shapes and sizes. Significantly, the Arizona find adds a third major...
When a hired hand brought in some skeletal remains unearthed on their okra farm in Archer, Fla., Ron and Pat Love asked a scientist friend to identify them. Horse bones, he said, good for nothing more than paperweights. Dissatisfied, the Loves sought a second opinion from Paleontologist S. David Webb of the Florida State Museum in Gainesville. Webb quickly determined that the bones had come not from a horse but from a short-legged rhinoceros called Teleoceras. It was a creature that had lumbered across that area of Florida millions of years...
Today more and more scientists seem to be matching their talent for experimentation with a surprising gift for exposition. One of them is a Harvard paleontologist named Stephen Jay Gould, 39, author of two pellucid collections of essays on evolution (Ever Since Darwin, The Panda's Thumb). Another is Dr. Lewis Thomas, 66, whose humane writings on biology and medicine in the pages of the New England Journal of Medicine became the basis for two bestsellers (The Lives of a Cell, The Medusa and the Snail). Others include Physicists Jeremy Bernstein, 50, a regular contributor to The New Yorker; Robert...
Gould's theory stirred an instant uproar. Says American Paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson, a friend of Teilhard's: "I don't think it was in his character." J.S. Werner, who with Oakley helped expose the forgery, doubts that Teilhard would have risked his burgeoning scientific career with such a ruse. Gould remains convinced it was a youthful joke that succeeded so well it made a confession difficult. Says he: "The burden of proof must now rest with those who would hold Father Teilhard blameless...