Word: paleontologists
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...months," says Staff Writer Richard Stengel, who wrote the main story. "He's funny and engaging, a person of tremendous charm, great personal presence and far-ranging knowledge. He sometimes communicates the feeling that others don't meet his standards." Stengel delved into the work of controversial Roman Catholic Paleontologist-The ologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, whose stress on the importance of mankind gave Cuomo a rationale in his quest for social justice. When Cuomo traveled to Stengel's alma mater, Princeton University, to make an address, the writer tagged along. "People were hanging off the rafters...
...essays of Stephen Jay Gould are good antidotes. In his fourth collection, the paleontologist, evo- lutionary biologist and Harvard lecturer continues to combine precision with an energetic style. On the ever-hypnotic copulatory practices of the praying mantis, for example: "The male, blessed with paired organs for transferring sperm, inserts one palp, then, if not yet attacked by the female, the other. Hungry females may then gobble up their mates, completing the double-entendre of a consummation devoutly to be wished...
What caused the death of dinosaurs? Scientists have blamed their demise on everything from lowered sea levels to lowered sperm counts. Now William Clemens, a paleontologist at the University of California, Berkeley, has added to the mystery. His expedition, sponsored by the U.S. Geological Survey, uncovered a cache of 180 dinosaur bones in Alaska, several hundred miles farther north than the creatures had previously been found. Among the fossils are skeletal remains of hadrosaurs, plant-eating duck-billed dinosaurs that stood up to 15 ft. high, and the teeth of a Tyrannosaurus-type carnivore...
...iridium and received still more from colleagues working at a third site on the other side of the world, in New Zealand. The evidence seemed overwhelming. In 1980 the Alvarez team finally published its results in the journal Science and stirred up some scientific debris of its own. Says Paleontologist Leo Hickey, director of the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale: "My first thought was this is one of Walter's practical jokes...
...Alvarezes' staunchest critics has been William Clemens, a paleontologist at the University of California, Berkeley. After systematically sampling parts of the eastern Montana area, he declared that the layer of iridium and the bones of the last surviving dinosaur were too far apart to share any meaningful connection. Besides, he asked, why should the mammals have survived any Cretaceous catastrophe? Says he: "If you're going to have a nuclear winter killing off the dinosaurs, why didn't it kill off everything else...