The pick-&-shovel corps of Science toils far afield, probing the earth for traces of vanished animals, men and civilizations. Recent doings of diggers:
Guatemala. In the ruins of the Mayan city of Piedras Negras, an expedition headed by Dr. J. Alden Mason of Philadelphia's University Museum found a rectangular limestone carving in high relief which showed plainly that the unknown sculptor had a sense of humor, at least of satiric portraiture. The block, 49 in. long, was called a lintel, although its scanty margins indicated that it was used not over a doorway but as a wall tablet. Parts of the carving were effaced, but by squeezing every available clue Miss M. Louise Baker, experienced archeological artist, was able to make a wash-drawing reconstruction of the original (see cut).
The lintel appears to depict a ceremonial harangue by a Mayan chieftain, sitting cross-legged on an altar and flanked by bowls of fruit. Artist Baker interprets the scene thus: The two standing figures at extreme left, paying no attention, are absorbed in their own argument, while the next man indignantly nudges one of them with his hip. The first seated figure on the left is delicately poking the back of the man in front to ask what is going on, and the latter is trying to see over the towering headdress of the fat man in front of him. Two of the seated figures meditatively finger their beads. The last on the right, losing interest, toys with his earplug.
Arizona. Huge, beaked reptiles gliding on batlike wings, the pterosaurs reached their greatest size in the Chalk Age (60-130 million years ago), achieved wingspreads up to 30 feet. These hollow-boned hobgoblins weighed no more than a Thanksgiving turkey. In the older Jurassic period (130-170 million years ago) they were generally much smaller than in the Chalk Age. Digging into a desert mountain slope which once was seabottom, Dr. T. A. Stoyanow, University of Arizona geologist, laid bare a Jurassic pterosaur skeleton with a wingspread of some 28 feet, biggest specimen of that period ever found.
Michigan. Fossil seaweeds have been found as old as 1,200,000,000 years. In a quarry between the north and south iron veins of the Menominee Range, a dynamite blast exposed Proterozoic seaweed which Oscar Halvorsen Reinholt, geologist and mining engineer, pronounced 1,500,000,000 years old. "The upper Michigan peninsula," said he, "now takes precedence over the section near Saratoga Springs, N. Y., as the oldest region in which life forms are known to have existed." Harvard's Peabody Museum eagerly sent for samples.