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” →

Discover, January 31, 1997

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There was a giddy buzz last October in the halls of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. During the annual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, photographs of a new fossil from China attracted crowds and gasps. It was the dream of many of the attendees: a feathered dinosaur.

In the early 1970s a handful of paleontologists led by John Ostrom of Yale had resurrected the discarded nineteenth-century notion that birds were the living descendants of dinosaurs-more precisely, Ostrom said, of the nimble, bipedal carnivores known as theropods.

Continue reading “Funky chicken” →

Discover, January 31, 1997

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Last October Brian Curtice announced that he had made a 100-foot dinosaur disappear. The former giant’s name was Ultrasaurus, and its remains (part of a shoulder and several vertebrae) had been discovered in the 1970s in a quarry in western Colorado-and nowhere else. Along with those remains were bones that were ascribed to another 100-foot plus plant-eating behemoth called Supersaurus. Some paleontologists have always been suspicious of the distinction, particularly since the so-called Ultrasaurus vertebrae were found book-ended between the bones of Supersaurus.

Continue reading “Superultrahyper-megasaurus” →

Discover, January 1, 1997

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Geologists have long been playing a game of leapfrog back through time. In 1912 Alfred Wegener claimed that the continents had reached their current positions after the disintegration of a single giant supercontinent that he called Pangaea (Greek for all Earth). By the 1980s enough rocks had been hammered and sectioned to confirm Wegener’s theory and even to map the 200-million-year-old landmass. This success inspired speculative geologists to leap further back in time and suggest that Pangaea had been assembled from pieces of another supercontinent. They named this older landmass, which they claimed had broken up more than 500 million years ago, Rodinia (Russian for motherland). In recent years research has shown that Rodinia was real.

Continue reading “In Times of Ur” →