Word: paleontologists
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...simply been too massive to survive on land. How could their bulk have been lethal? According to one suggestion that many weekend athletes can identify with, the dinosaurs suffered from slipped disks, which left them unable to forage for food. Great heft could even trigger infertility. In 1946 a paleontologist concluded that because large animals do not shed excess heat as efficiently as small animals do, a temperature increase of just 2 degrees F could have baked the considerable testicles of a ten-ton male dinosaur enough to kill his sperm...
Whether these catastrophic impacts are random or cyclic remains to be seen. But if they occur at all, they could shake the foundations of evolutionary biology and call into question the current concept of natural selection. Should the Alvarez theory be correct, says Harvard Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, the importance of competition between species diminishes. If every so often a megablast opens up a broad array of ecological niches, then new creatures can flourish without having to crowd out the old. "If you ask the question, 'Why are we here?' " says Gould, "the answer is, 'Because the dinosaurs disappeared...
...comets that circles the sun far beyond the orbit of Pluto--sending them hurtling toward earth. Others assign that role to Planet X, while some insist that the slow, bobbing ride of the sun and its planets around the Milky Way galaxy is responsible. Whatever the details, declares Paleontologist J. John Sepkoski Jr. of the University of Chicago, the evidence for periodic mass extinctions "very strongly implicates an extraterrestrial mechanism...
...staid journals alike. Supporters of the Milky Way proposal dismiss the Nemesis notion as "unlikely" and "ad hoc," and death star advocates are scornful of the galactic concept. Many consider all the newfangled extraterrestrial scenarios to be half-baked takeoffs of H.G. Wells. Says an indignant Dewey McLean, a paleontologist at Virginia Polytechnic Institute: "It's science gone absolutely bonkers...
...fossils. Like other samples of rock from that era, it showed that the creatures alive during the late Cretaceous period had, by geological time scales, suddenly disappeared. In between the limestone layers was a dull red layer of clay about half an inch thick, first discovered by an Italian paleontologist around...