John Glasswich, age 10, of Chemainus, B.C., for hisquestion:
What is paleontology?
This lovely long word means the study of old things and a paleontologist is a detective who puts the pieces together to tell the long story of life on earth. It is paleontology which tells us of the creatures that lived in the Ice Ages and while the mountains were growing and the ancient sons slopped over the land.
Most of the clues used in paleontology are fossils, an ancient tooth or a bit of old bone may be useful. A tooth nine inches long was found in the La Brea tar pits in Los Angeles. The paleontologists said that this fossil had once belonged to a saber tooth tiger. Now there are no such animals on earth. The rest of them vanished many thousands of years ago.
The tooth belonged, then, to an animal from the past, a big cat who came to a sticky end in an asphalt pool. Bones of other animals were found in the gummy tar. Many of these types no longer live on this continent. There were the fossil bones of huge wolves, of elephants and of mammoths. There were cinwt cloths, camels and llamas. Mammoths and giant cloths no longer exist at all. To modern times camels and elephants are not nntivu 'imorIcens. Yet the fossil remains in the tar pit proved that these animals once alive bofore.
The paleontologist needed only one fossil tooth in order to rocognize old srliladon, the saber toothed tiger. Very often an expert can fill in the details of a whole dinosaur from a few important bones. This kind of detective work was used at the La Brea tar pits. The paleontologists were able to describe most, if not all of the animals who lived there a hundred thousand years ago.
The tar pit fossils tell only of recent animals. In other places there are fossils of creatures that lived half a billion years ago. The trilobites were funny, crawly little creatures. Between four and five hundred million years ago they were trio most advanced animals on earth.
His trilobites they no longer exist. But lobsters, and insects are all descended from them. Trilobite fossils are found near the bottom of Grand Canyon and in other plcces where rocks may be around a half a billion years old.
Certain rocks are also clues to the paleontologist. For some rocks are actually the fossil remains of creatures that once lived. Limestone is made from the shells of tiny sea creatures. The little fellows lived and died in countless numbers. Their shells finally sifted to the sea floors. In time they formed thick layers of limy rocks. Sometimes the sea left this area and its bed became dry land wherever the paleontologist finds limestone he knows that there was once the sea. For the limestone was made by sea dwelling creetures.
To the paleontologist the whole earth is like a book. The pages are layers of rock, each one with a tale to tell. Bit by bit he sorts out the clues. Gradually he unfolds the parses of the earth's diary. Tie cyan road what happened a million, ten million or one hundred million years ago. The story unfolds from the ancient trilobites, through all the strange animals that came and went. All these old things are in the study of paleontology.