Paleontologist article (Introduction)

by David Turell , Sunday, November 09, 2014, 14:54 (3456 days ago)

Why his work is important:-http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/09/opinion/sunday/prehistorys-brilliant-future.html?emc=edit_th_20141109&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=60788861&_r=0-"WITHIN a morning, we knew we had stumbled upon something extraordinary: Dozens of dinosaur skeletons, scores of delicate mammal and lizard skeletons, nests of eggs with embryos, and nesting dinosaurs were splayed out on the surface of a rocky amphitheater not much larger than a baseball field. The oviraptors found nesting on a brood of eggs were the first hard evidence, only hypothesized until then, of parental care among dinosaurs.-"Fossils from the Gobi, as well as strata in northern China, also include extraordinary specimens of tiny, shrewlike mammals that point the way toward the origins of the modern group of mammals that includes us. The new discoveries continue to pile up, including a report last week on a remarkably preserved skull of a 70-million-year-old groundhog-like mammal from Madagascar.-"Since 2000, we have identified five early hominins, our close prehistoric relatives. And if you think that the fossil record deals only with such changes in million-year scales, think again. Just 50,000 years ago — a blink of an eye in the deep time of paleontology — there were at least three, and maybe four, species of the human lineages cohabiting on this planet. Yet within that span of time, only our own species made it through the evolutionary sieve."-H. sapiens, Neanderthal, Denisovans, Hobbits (nickname) are the four.