Word: paleontologists
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...under way. Geologists and geochemists are reconstructing the Precambrian planet, looking for changes in the atmosphere and ocean that might have put evolution into sudden overdrive. Developmental biologists are teasing apart the genetic toolbox needed to assemble animals as disparate as worms and flies, mice and fish. And paleontologists are exploring deeper reaches of the fossil record, searching for organisms that might have primed the evolutionary pump. "We're getting data," says Harvard University paleontologist Andrew Knoll, "almost faster than we can digest it." (See a photo-essay on Darwin...
...needle-sharp legs, and also by Wiwaxia, a whimsical armored slug with two rows of upright scales. And then there was Anomalocaris, a fearsome predator that caught its victims with spiny appendages and crushed them between jaws that closed like the shutter of a camera. "Weird wonders," Harvard University paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould called them in his 1989 book, Wonderful Life, which celebrated the strangeness of the Burgess Shale animals...
...UCLA paleontologist Bruce Runnegar, however, disagrees with Seilacher. Runnegar argues that the fossil known as Ernietta, which resembles a pouch made of wide-wale corduroy, may be some sort of seaweed that generated food through photosynthesis. Charniodiscus, a frond with a disklike base, he classifies as a colonial cnidarian, the phylum that includes jellyfish, sea anemones and sea pens. And Dickinsonia, which appears to have a clearly segmented body, Runnegar tentatively places in an ancestral group that later gave rise to roundworms and arthropods. The Cambrian explosion did not erupt out of the blue, argues Runnegar. "It's the continuation...
None of it will happen, though, without strong action from the Ecuadorian government and pressure from scientists and conservationists in the North and South. As Sonoma State University paleontologist Matthew James puts it, "If there's one place in the world where we should draw a line in the sand, it's the Galapagos...
...possible? Absolutely, say paleontologists. After all, aside from a few fossilized scraps, nobody has ever seen a dinosaur's skin. And modern lizards and birds, both relatives of the dinosaurs, are often brightly colored. Some scientists--most notably Robert Bakker, an iconoclastic paleontologist who served as an informal adviser on the movie version of Jurassic Park--have even suggested that dinosaurs could have sported feathers. Which is precisely what Crichton's baby tyrannosaurs...