In the fusty workrooms of the Smithsonian Institution last week reposed some 50 hard little balls, one-half inch to one inch in diameter. To a layman's eye they looked like dull, dirty grey or yellowish grey pebbles. Actually they are pearls—and, as pearls go, huge. Their value as jewels is zero, but they are precious to science. They are fossil pearls.
In the Chalk Age of 100,000,000 years ago, when the dinosaurs reached their lurid climax before extinction, there lived in the sea shallows a big mollusk, Inoceramus, with a shell width up to four feet. Inoceramus was not much different from...
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