Word: paleontologists
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Such vast expenditures of energy and resources are contributing to the growth of an entirely new science called exobiology (from the Greek exo, or out of), which has come into being in the past decade and is dedicated specifically to the study of extraterrestrial life. Paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson has sardonically called exobiology a science "that has yet to demonstrate that its subject matter exists." But in laboratories, at giant radio observatories and at esoteric symposiums, some of the world's keenest intellects have begun to focus on the new discipline...
Teilhard de Chardin was a French Jesuit and paleontologist by profession, co-discoverer of the "Peking Man." He wrote extensively throughout his life and his theology is based on a vision of the cosmic evolution of man proceeding from the alpha point--base matter--to the omega point--the union of man and God in God's perfectness. Freire borrows this cosmic optimism for the future of man but tempers it with the political realism of Reinhold Niebur, an American Protestant theologian. Friere and Neibur feel that the cosmic evolution of man can become pathologically fixated at a certain point...
Scary Scrapes. Jane was 26 and a scientific nonentity when she began her work. Born in London in modest circumstances, she worked as a secretary when she arrived in Nairobi. Struck by her feeling for animals, Africa's worldrenowned paleontologist, Dr. L.S.B. Leakey, wangled a grant and packed the young lady off to chase chimps. At first she could not get within 500 yards of her subjects. Real discoveries started, however, when a bold chimp she called David Graybeard strolled into her camp one day and began chewing on a palm nut. Lured by bananas, his friends followed. Jane...
...thing, the first Neanderthal bones were dug just about the time that Darwin astonished the world with his announcement that man and ape were descended from a common ancestor. Neanderthal's apish image was further enforced by the writings early in this century of the respected French paleontologist Pierre Marcellin Boule. His portrait of Neanderthal as a stunted, beetle-browed creature who walked with bent knees and arms dangling in front of him served as the model for several generations of artists and cartoonists. While certain coarse features in Neanderthal man are undeniable, on physical considerations alone he deserves...
Poking through the fossil collection of The Netherlands' Teyler Museum in September, Yale Paleontologist John H. Ostrom spotted one musty specimen that looked odd to his trained eye. It was labeled pterosaur, a flying reptile that inhabited the earth from 65 to 200 million years ago. But when Ostrom held the fossil to the light, he saw the distinctly unreptilian impression of a feather. "My heartbeat began going up fast," recalls Ostrom, who quickly recognized that the specimen was not a pterosaur at all. It was, in fact, a far rarer prehistoric aviator: an Archaeopteryx (literally "ancient wing...