Linda Patterson,, age 12, of Austell, Ga., for her questions

Where is Bikini

Bikini is a series of 36 islets, washed by the warm waters of the mid Pacific Ocean. The islets rest on a crescent shaped reef some 25 miles long. The total land area in the group is 2,32 square miles  which is not enough solid ground to hold up a fair sized city.

This ocean coral reef with its family of islets is part of the Marshall Islands,0 about midway between the Hawaiian Islands and the Philippines, All these islands are part of Micronesia, a name which means small islands. The people who live here are called Micronesians*

 Billy Hazleton, age 12, of Visalia, Calif., for his question:

How did the Geological eras yet their names?

To a geologist, the rocks of the earth's crust read like an age old diary. Some of the pages are layers of limestone, shale and sandstone which formed from the sediments on the floors of ancient seas. Some are hard beds of granites and laves poured forth from old volcanoes. In some places, the rocky layers have buckled and folded and shuffled the pages of ewth f s diary.

Here and there, wind and weather have dog eared the pages Running water arid ice fingers have scored markings which, to a geologist, are as clear as written words. The busy Colorado river dug a holes a mile deep. I t made grand Canyon which reveals layer below layer, page below page„ way bank to more than 1000 million years of earth's diary.

Geologists have learned to read this age old diary only in the past 100 years. Many details remain to be studied. It is clear, however, that the story is told in five long books, each lasting hundreds of millions of years. These books are known as the geological eras, They are named, not for the rocks themselves, but for the specimens found pressed in and between the hard pages. These specimens are, of course, fossils of plants and animals and the eras are named for the kind of living things which existed while each diary book was being written.

The first era is the areheozoic, meaning the early beginning of life. There are no clear fossils in the ancient book but its lime stones and graphites suggest that simple one celled creatures helped to make them. The archeozoic era began at least 2,000 million years ago and lasted perhaps 1000 million years.

The second era is the peoterozoici meaning the earlier life. some 500 million years and left countless fossil plants and animals pressed within its rocky pages. This is the age of the trilobites and other small, crusty sea dwellers.

The third era is the paleozoics meaning ancient animal life. It lasted more than 300 million years and its fossil records show that life was developing at a great rate. Before it ended, scorpions, insects, amphibians and reptiles had left the ancient seas for life on the land. Large areas of the land were clothed in a green mantle of plants.

The fourth era is the mesozoic, meaning the middle life. It began about 200 million years ago and lasted for 100 million years. This book tells the story of the dinosaurs and how plants developed flowers. Before it ended, the furry little warm blooded mammals had come to live in the world.

The fifth era is the cenozoie, meaning recent life. It opened 60 million years ago and is still in full swing* This is the era in which life as we know it developed. Feathery birds took to the air and mammals became the dominant land animals. When all was ready, about a million years ago, the human family came to live in this wonderful world.