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Seeing Fossils in a New Light |
| Section: NATURAL SCIENCE / AT THE EDGE |
| Author: Steve Voynick |
| Publication: The world & I online |
| Issue Date: 1/1/1999 |
| Size: 2,569 Words, 18,109 Characters |
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In the 1993 blockbuster movie Jurassic Park, scientists re-created dinosaurs by cloning DNA samples recovered from amber-encased fossils of blood-sucking insects that had preyed on dinosaurs. Jurassic Park, of course, is science fiction. But its basic premise--that high-tech analytical methods and bold interpretation of the resulting wealth of new data have revolutionized paleontology--is right on the money.
For much of this century, paleontologists were niche scientists who worked in relative obscurity. They excavated and preserved fossilized bones, reconstructed skeletons, then made observations, interpretations, and conservative extrapolations about the physical nature of the original animals. Paleontology--the study of ancient life as reflected by the fossil record--was content to b...
. . .
...rest in the rapidity of major mass extinctions will have waned as better paleontologic and geochronologic data reveal just how fast each of these events occurred," Erwin says. "We are already seeing a shift of emphasis to the far more knotty problems of understanding the recoveries that followed the mass extinctions. All in all, the future will bring some very exciting times for paleontology."
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