For
26 years, Molly Miller has been a professor of geology at Vanderbilt. Every
four or five years, she sheds her lab coat to don multiple layers of fleece
and fabric in order to collect rock samples in the ultimate geologic laboratory:
Antarctica. In this frozen landscape she looks for, and finds, evidence that
an abundant animal community flourished there more than 200 million years ago.
The evidence that she studies is the burrows and tracks that these ancient animals
left behind in the rock. Miller uses these “trace fossils” to reconstruct the
environment, ecosystem and climate that existed in these ancient times. She
is convinced that this forbidding land contains important clues about long-term
climate change and the origin and evolution of mammals.
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By
Julie Neumann
Published: Nov. 24, 2004 |
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