National Geographic Society
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Inspiring people to care about the planet since 1888
RSS Syndication
At 3 p.m. on this dim, socked-in afternoon, the Nathaniel B. Palmer reached its rendezvous point—63.7658 degrees south, 56.8273 degrees west—an unremarkable patch of water littered with scraps of sea ice. Ten months earlier a treasure had been dropped into the sea at this spot and anchored to the muddy bottom, 2,112 feet below, by a lead weight. On this day Craig Smith, a marine ecologist from the University of Hawaii at Manoa, was returning on the Palmer to reclaim his treasure. His prospects looked grim.
We knew their brains were small and early estimates of their height and weight showed they were small in body as well, but we didn’t have a good sense of their body proportions or skeletal details from the neck down. And the reason why we cared about their bodies so much was that a paradigm was about to be broken.
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