Palaeontologists Sentence Examples

Dall and many other invertebrate palaeontologists subscribed.

In later years the attention of the best palaeontologists has been withdrawn from the hodman's work of making " new species " of fossils, to the scientific task of completing our knowledge of individual species, and tracing out the succession of the forms presented by any given type in time.

Outer columns of upper molars similar, the hinder ones not flattened; ridges of lower molars oblique or directly transverse, a third ridge to the last molar in the earlier forms. The Lophiodontidae, which date from the Eocene, come very close to Hyracotherium in the horse-line; and it is solely on the authority of American palaeontologists that the division of these early forms into equoids and tapiroids is attempted.

Cephalopod molluscs have been traced back to the straight-shelled nautiloids of the genus Volborthella, while true ammonites have been found in the inferior Permian of the Continent and by American palaeontologists in the true coal measures.

With good reason geographers have given reluctant consent to some of the bold restorations of ancient continental outlines by palaeontologists; yet some of the greatest achievements of recent science have been in this field.

This line of hypothesis and demonstration is typical of the palaeogeographic methods generally - namely, that vertebrate palaeontologists, impressed by the sudden appearance of extinct forms of continental life, demand land connexion or migration tracts from common centres of origin and dispersal, while the invertebrate palaeontologist alone is able to restore ancient coast-lines and determine the extent and width of these tracts.

In following the discovery of the law of recapitulation among palaeontologists we have clearly stated the chief contribution of palaeontology to the science of ontogeny - namely, the correspondences and differences between FIG.

The minute gradations observed by Hyatt, Waagen and all invertebrate palaeontologists, in the hard parts (shells) of molluscs, &c., are analogous to the equally minute gradations observed by vertebrate palaeontologists in the hard parts of reptiles and mammals.

Vertebrate palaeontologists were slow to grasp this principle; while the early speculative phylogenies of the horse of Huxley and Marsh, for example, were mostly displayed monophyletically, or in single lines of descent, it is now recognized that the horses which were placed by Marsh in a single series are really to be ranged in a great number of contemporaneous but separate series, each but partially known, and that the direct phylum which leads to the modern horse has become a matter of far more difficult search.

The inference is almost irresistible that the law of gradual transformation through minute continuous change is by far the most universal; but many palaeontologists as well as zoologists and botanists hold a contrary opinion.

Thus both invertebrate and vertebrate palaeontologists have reached independently the conclusion that the evolution of groups is not continuously at a uniform rate, but that there are, especially in the beginnings of new phyla or at the time of acquisition of new organs, sudden variations in the rate of evolution which have been termed variously " rhythmic," "pulsating," " efflorescent," "intermittent " and even " explosive " (Deperet).

It is the general practice of palaeontologists to regard each graptolite polypary (rhabdosome) developed from a single sicula as an individual of the highest order.

A more generally accepted view - especially among palaeontologists - is the tritubercular theory, according to which the most generalized type of tooth consists of three cusps arranged in a triangle, with the apex pointing inwards in the teeth of the upper jaw.

Possibly mammalian remains also occur in the antecedent Triassic epoch, some palaeontologists regarding the South African Tritylodon as a mammal, while others consider that it was probably a reptile.

The determination of the relative degree of perfection of organization attained by two animals 1 A great deal of superfluous hypothesis has lately been put forward in the name of " the principle of convergence of characters " by a certain school of palaeontologists.

The rarity of really continuous series has naturally led palaeontologists to support the hypothesis Of brusque transitions of structure.

Those who work with living forms of which it is possible to obtain a large number of specimens, and those who make revisions of the provisional species of palaeontologists, are slowly coming to some such conception as that a species is the abstract central point around which a group of variations oscillate, and that the peripheral oscillations of one species may even overlap those of an allied species.

A start was made through the efforts of the palaeontologists and geologists, with only indirect or incidental aid from the archaeologists.

The ancient life of the Atlantic border of North America was also becoming known through the work of the pioneer verte.rate palaeontologists Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), Richard Harlan (1796-1843), Jeffries Wyman (1814-1874) and Joseph Leidy (1823-1891).

The collective term " mutation," as now employed by palaeontologists, signifies a type modified to a slight degree in one or more of its characters along a progressive or definite line of phyletic development.

All these writers attacked the problem of descent, and published preliminary phylogenies of such animals as the horse, rhinoceros and elephant, which time has proved to be of only general value and not at all comparable to the exact phylogenetic series which were being established by invertebrate palaeontologists.