Discover, July 1, 1997
All vertebrates that live on land–from humans to alligators to birds–are collectively known as tetrapods, meaning four feet. The name sticks even though the legs to which two of these feet are attached have become arms in humans and wings in birds. In snakes, the change was even more radical: they lost all four of their limbs. One of the few remaining signs of their limbed heritage is the presence of vestigial hips imprisoned in the rib cage.
Discover, July 1, 1997
On the first night of July 1994 Jeff Tobolski put himself and his Westwind 2 twin-engine jet nine miles above the Oklahoma-Arkansas border, just to the west of a gargantuan storm that was pummeling the ground below with baseballs of hail, heavy black sheets of rain, and enough bolts of lightning to turn the night almost to day. Usually Tobolski flies business executives from city to city, and usually he would not have brought his clientele anywhere near this particular point in space and time. But on this night he was piloting one of two jet loads of atmospheric scientists who would have flown right into the storm if they could have. We were flying for scientific discovery, and so, Tobolski remarks with considerable understatement, we were removing some of the typical caution.
Discover, June 1, 1997
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.
Discover, May 1, 1997
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.
Discover, March 31, 1997
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.