Paleontologist's interest

Usage examples of fossil.

It showed a man in antique clothing standing behind a fossil ammonite that almost reached his waist.

This junction produced a complicated pattern of lobes and saddles that is frequently seen in the ammonite fossils found today in Cretaceous marine deposits.

Because they evolved rapidly, had worldwide distribution by virtue of their open-water habitats, and species are readily distinguished, ammonoids are index fossils for the Jurassic.

Our final examples of anomalous pre-Tertiary evidence are not in the category of fossil human bones, but rather in the category of fossil humanlike footprints.

If anomalously old human fossils were found in situations like this, they would be subjected to merciless criticism.

This is quite a bit more recent than the Early Pleistocene date originally ascribed to the Piltdown fossils, but it is still anomalously old for a skull of the fully human type in England.

Measuring concentrations of oxygen isotopes trapped in belemnite guard shell fossils, scientists have determined that the seas of that time were warmer than today.

For instance, from measurements made on belemnite fossils from New Jersey, the ocean temperature in the latter part of the Cretaceous at this latitude seems to have been around 72 degrees Fahrenheit year-round, a warmth comparable to the seas around southern Florida today.

It reminded me of a sepia painting I had once seen done from the ink of a fossil Belemnite that must have perished and become fossilized millions of years ago.

It was a fine-grained gray stone with two fossil belemnites swimming across its surface, like pale comets.

Second, modern experiments have shown that bipedalism does not increase energy efficiency, and as more fossils have been found we now recognise that early bipedal apes lived in environments where trees were plentiful.

Toroca had left the other surveyors back at the great cliffs on the storm-swept coast, looking for any fossils at all from below the Bookmark layer, and cataloging the myriad forms they found above it.

His team worked every daylight moment just below the chalk seam of the Bookmark layer, the bottommost rock stratum containing fossils, but nothing turned up.

Park of Extinct Animals was breached and many of the inner enclosures were opened, releasing into the wilderness nearly the entire extraordinary collection of carefully cloned beasts of yesteryear: moas, quaggas, giant ground sloths, dodos, passenger pigeons, aurochs, oryxes, saber-toothed cats, great auks, cahows and many another lost species that had been called back from oblivion by the most painstaking manipulation of fossil genetic material.

Franz Weidenreich assumed leadership of the Cenozoic Research Laboratory and wrote a comprehensive series of reports on the Beijing man fossils.