Word: paleontologists
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...million-year-old Archaeopteryx has apparently been dethroned by a specimen named Protoavis ("first bird"), which lived 75 million years before Archaeopteryx. Last week's announcement was based on two fragmentary fossil skeletons found in the arid badlands of western Texas in 1984 by Texas Tech University Paleontologist Sankar Chatterjee. They suggest that Protoavis was a contemporary of the earliest dinosaurs. "If the identification is correct," says Yale Paleobiologist John Ostrom, who has examined the crow-size remains, "it has to send us back to the drawing board...
...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...
...that's a big monkey, thought Paleontologist Alan Walker as he plucked the skull fragment from a gully west of Kenya's Lake Turkana. But that was no monkey. The bone belonged to a 2.5 million-year-old ape-man called Australopithecus boisei. The discovery surprised Walker, since he and most anthropologists believed the boisei species had evolved 2.2 million years ago. "This is probably more significant than almost anything we've had for a good number of years," says Anthropologist Richard Leakey, one of Walker's coauthors of a report about the fossil in last week's issue...
...other words," says Kuban, "there was no question that a dinosaur was capable of making these elongated prints." He offers several explanations for the toelessness, all acceptable to paleontologists: soft mud might have filled the narrow toe marks soon after the dinosaur walked by. Then, too, some other material may have sifted into the toe marks long after the prints hardened. Or perhaps, for some reason, erosion distorted the prints. Even before Kuban's findings, mainstream scientists did not lose much sleep over the Paluxy footprints. Says Harvard Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, who has visited the site: "Everyone knows that...
Cuomo's world view has also been shaped by the philosophy of the French Jesuit and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, whose writings were suppressed by the church until after his death in 1955. Until the early 1960s, Cuomo accepted the teaching of the priests at St. John's that life was a moral obstacle course, a treacherous interval between birth and eternity. But in the '60s, Cuomo says, he was liberated by the discovery of Teilhard's Divine Milieu (a book he has "dipped into 100 times"), in which the Jesuit propounded the philosophy that God made...