A person who goes before or announces the coming of another

Usage examples of precursor.

Precursors of these future mind improvers are already being experimented with.

At that point they fly it into Colombia, where they refine it with ether and acetone, and some other precursor chemicals turn it into cocaine hydrochloride, the powder.

There are lots of neurotransmitter precursors in this shit, phenylalanine and glutamate.

Maybe the thoughts we generate today and flick around from mind to mind, like the jokes that turn up simultaneously at dinner parties in Hong Kong and Boston, or the sudden changes in the way we wear our hair, or all the popular love songs, are the primitive precursors of more complicated, polymerized structures that will come later, analogous to the prokaryotic cells that drifted through shallow pools in the early days of biological evolution.

With waves and tides and hot rocks and solar evaporation to concentrate the amino acids and proteinoids found in the seas and to turn them into the precursors of life, with lightning and heat and radiation and ultraviolet light to turn simple molecules into more complex ones, with the physics and chemistry of the universe itself to produce the necessary elements and simple compounds in appropriate amounts, it may even be said that life on Earth was inevitable, that it had to appear as soon as a microsphere was formed with just the right bit of nucleic acid within itself.

I was walking through the gate when Sweetie Pie stopped in front of me, her body rigid and a growl issuing from her throat that sounded like the precursor to a visit from Linda Blair in her younger days.

Even more perplexing were the facts that the Llano and Nenana complexes were contemporaneous and both seem to have appeared without precursors in very different parts of North America at almost exactly the same time.

Heirs of the Liberal Republicans and precursors of the Greenbackers and Populists, these independent parties were as voices crying in the wilderness, preparing the way for national parties of reform.

It would be an exaggeration to say that they were philo- rather than anti-Semites, and an anachronism to conceive of them as precursors of the modern interreligious spirit.

With waves and tides and hot rocks and solar evaporation to concentrate the amino acids and proteinoids found in the seas and to turn them into the precursors of life, with lightning and heat and radiation and ultraviolet light to turn simple molecules into more complex ones, with the physics and chemistry of the universe itself to produce the necessary elements and simple compounds in appropriate amounts, it may even be said that life on Earth was inevitable, that it had to appear as soon as a microsphere was formed with just the right bit of nucleic acid within itself.

They contain monounsaturated fats to keep your arteries clear, as well as levels years of precursors of serotonin to boost mood.

Angina pectoris could be the precursor to a full blown myocardial infarction.

At one point in the history of paleoanthropology, several scientists who believed in evolution actually accepted the Thenay Miocene tools, but attributed them to a precursor of the human type.

He has even imagined primitive carpenter shops and ovens and huts on these paths where the voyageurs must stop for repairs, food, and rest--the precursors of garage, road-house, and hotel.

The efficient cause thus referred to existed in the person of Samuel Hartlib, philanthropist and polypragmatist, precursor of the Franklins and Rumfords of the succeeding century.