Discover, June 1, 1997

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At the moment a hungry public is gorging on yet another chunk of dinosaur flesh, unofficially known as Jurassic Park II. What can explain the success of its multibillion-dollar, multimedia franchise? In part, our fascination with death and resurrection: though dinosaurs vanished 65 million years ago, people are entranced by the impossible dream of the great beasts’ return. And in part, the fascination lies in the dinosaurs’ being truly great beasts, in their numbering among them fearful predators of a kind now absent from the planet. Of course, paleontologists like to remind us that strictly speaking, dinosaurs aren’t dead. The pigeon perched on the gutter, the starling yakking in the bushes, the finch pecking at the feeder–they are all dinosaurs as much as humans are mammals.

Continue reading “Terror, Take Two” →

Discover, May 1, 1997

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Last summer Jerry Dickens and his fellow geologists were hauling mud-filled pipes up from the seafloor onto the deck of the research vessel Resolution when one of the mud-core samples exploded. Just as we were pulling it up, it blew, and mud shot 100 feet like a cannon, says Dickens. The geologists weren’t entirely surprised. They had lugged up the mud–It looks like green Play-Doh, says Dickens–in sampling tubes after drilling about 1,400 feet into ocean sediments. Each 30-foot-long tube has a one- inch hole where a little extra sediment sometimes squeezes out if the material is under high pressure.

Continue reading “Their Game Is Mud” →

Discover, March 31, 1997

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I have just finished my sketch of my species theory. If, as I believe that my theory is true and if it be accepted even by one competent judge, it will be a considerable step in science.

It’s a rare pleasure to follow a great thinker on the trail of a great idea, not in the form of a cozy autobiography or some socio-politico-psychosexual analysis but as the events actually unfolded. Fortunately, while Charles Darwin was struggling with the concept of natural selection, he wrote a number of uncommonly enlightening letters, some of which Frederick Burkhardt has culled from Darwin’s vast correspondence.

Continue reading “Charles Darwin’s Letters: A Selection” →

Discover, March 1, 1997

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Dawn Noren hoists oxygen tanks onto her back, places an air regulator in her mouth, grabs a plastic box and slate, and falls out of the motorboat into the ocean. Through 50 feet of pale blue Bahamas water she can see the ten other divers kneeling in a circle on the sandy, ribbed seafloor. She swims down to the group and positions herself at its edge. Two more divers arrive and glide into the middle of the circle, carrying with them long white drums full of dead herring. They are followed by the animals that brought everyone here: two Atlantic bottle-nosed dolphins named Bimini and Stripe.

Continue reading “The Dolphin Strategy” →

Discover, February 1, 1997

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Sixty-five million years ago, at the end of the Cretaceous Period, a 10-mile-wide comet or asteroid dropped out of the sky and plowed out a 120-mile-wide crater in the Caribbean near Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. The impact, many researchers believe, was at least partly responsible for the fifth biggest extinction of all time, with numerous species of plants, marine animals, and, most famously, dinosaurs vanishing. But finding the links between the crater, known as Chicxulub, and the pattern of extinctions has been tricky.

Continue reading “When North America Burned” →