The Fossil Story (1953)

[Music] The Grand Canyon of the Colorado. Massive rocks carved into corridors by turbulent waters. [Music] This is not only one of the great spectacles of all time, but a monument to time [Music] itself. It is a monument a mile high with a history 1 bill500 million years old. Since prehistoric times, these rocks have faced the sun and rain, wind and flood. In stony silence, they have watched the forward progress of a changing world. But sealed deep within them is the strange story of the things they've seen. The layers of rock are like pages of an ancient book. And the story they have to tell can be understood by those who learn the secret of their language. The symbols of that language are fossils. A fern that grew 140 million years ago. A fish that swam 300 million years [Music] ago. Ancient remains of prehistoric times carrying with them secrets of life long past. Fossil leaves. Fossil birds. The footprint of a dinosaur. Fossilized tunnels where worms once crawled. These are remnants which not only trace unrecorded history, but also directly affect the world we live in now. Most essentials of everyday living depend on supplies of petroleum. And in the constant search for oil, fossils are useful tools. When a prospective field is being explored, geologists seek out these telltale fossils. At selected intervals, the drill is raised. The rock, which has been forced into the hollow bit, is carefully [Music] removed. In portable laboratories at the exploration well, the core is examined. The fossils found provide important clues telling the geologist whether he is drilling above, in or below the straighta in which he expects to find oil. Nearly everything we have learned of the past from fossils is due to scientists called paleontologists. In faroff places, steaming jungles, desert wastess, and inaccessible mountain ranges, they search for fossils which may increase our knowledge of the past and make it live again. They work with precision instruments in surroundings where steam shovels and bulldozers might seem more appropriate. Such elaborate care may seem excessive, but skillful handling is essential if fossils are to be extracted from the entombing rock. Wherever man probes the surface of the earth with heavy machinery or hand tools in far off places or a few yards from his own back door, he may find some hidden record linking the distant past with the living present. For fossils are remains of animals and plants that lived in the geological past and have been preserved. Occasionally fossils may be the actual bones of some ancient animal, but usually chemical change has slowly turned the bones to stone or created an enduring cast. Sometimes merely a footprint has been preserved, or the imprint of a leaf, or the delicate tracery of an insect's wings. The oldest trace of life has been found in limestone rocks. Evidence of this life in the form of fossil algae may be found today, long after its death, perhaps 1 bill500 million years ago, an almost inconceivable period of time. By comparison, the last 2,000 years would be less than an hour out of a man's life. Bacteria that lived 750 million years ago are believed responsible for much of the world's supply of iron. Slight amounts of which mixed with other materials account for the coloring in these [Music] rocks. Iron salts dissolved in the water were changed by these tiny organisms into a form of iron which would not dissolve. Living and dying for millions of years in inconceivable numbers, these bacteria caused the accumulation of vast beds of iron ore and gave the world an age of steel from a legacy 7 and 12 million centuries [Music] old. The next chapter of the fossil story tells about the evolution of life. Some 500 million years ago, these rocks were far beneath the surface of primordial oceans. Present evidence indicates that life existed only in the water at that time. Seaweed, much as we see it today, was a common [Music] plant. Krinoids, lilyshaped plant-like animals, were among the earliest forms of animal life. along with trilobytes, hard-shelled creatures similar to crabs and lobsters. After another 80 million years, the oceans were teeming with elementary animal life, various types of coral, by valves, and other forms of marine life. These fossil footprints tell one of the great stories of all time. They were made by one of the first air breathing animals, a scorpion, quite similar to those living today. The first to venture from the sea and seek their entire existence on land. The first to breathe the air and warm their bodies in the sun. That was about 375 million years ago. In the following million centuries, plant life spread across the land and plant fossils revealed that forests of strange trees and ferns flourished in an eerie world and then vanished, leaving behind only their story imprinted in the rocks. Life in the sea was also developing. Fishlike animals with backbones and skeletons within their bodies began to appear. Some assuming fantastic sizes and shapes. About 250 million years ago, many parts of the earth looked like this. It was the time of the great amphibians. Animals that lived both in water and on land. The plants of this period have been turned by chemical change and time into coal. But strange as these days were, they heralded wonders even more fantastic in the 100 million years to follow. The reign of the dinosaurs. Giant reptiles almost beyond the realm of imagination. A world of creatures towering above the level of a three-story house and weighing more than 20 tons. Some types of dinosaurs grew heavy protective plates, turning their bodies into armored tanks. Some were harmless vegetarian giants, browsing peacefully on shrubs and trees. Trees which, like these beasts, now too are fossils. The most beautiful fossils in the world. From satin black to purest white, these petrified trees contain all the delicate colors of the rainbow. Born here by floods, they drifted into shallow lagoons and were buried in the sand. Alkaline water soaked through the sand and saturated the wood with silica, preserving the entire cellular structure, even the growth rings. The action of wind and rain has uncovered these logs turned by time into semi-precious stone and by man into jewels, onx and jasper, calcetted and carnelon, chrysopra and agot. Many animals which roame the mountains and the lands as recently as 40,000 years ago have become extinct. In what is now Los Angeles, some blundered into the Labraa tar pits and sank below the surface. Their flesh decayed, but their skeletons remained intact. Excavation of these pits has yielded the largest collection of ice age mammals ever discovered. There were slowmoving sloths, fast running camels, and fierce flesh-eating birds. There were large, dire wolves. And the terrible saber-tooththed tigers, kings of an animal empire now vanished. Yet, strangely enough, some animals very much alive today can trace their ancestry for millions of years directly back to the first mammals, marsupials, which carry their young in a pouch. And the lemur, the first of the monkeylike animals. In the laboratory, even stranger things can be seen. Descendants of tiny marine animals called forominifera. Their ancestors swarmed the seas hundreds of millions of years ago. When they died, countless billions settled in layers of sediment thousands of feet deep and became fossils. Today we find these fossils in the form of limestone, chalk, marble. They also give us calcium and phosphorus and they form an important component of cement. Fossils are found almost everywhere under the ground or on top of it in far off places or in your own backyard. This is dietmacous earth made up of fossils of datoms that floated in the ocean 20 million years ago. soft and very light. There are 40 million in a cubic inch. But most important, they are extremely porous. After processing to remove impurities, they serve mankind in various ways. Particularly as filtering agents, do they affect our daily lives. They are used in the refining of sugar and the manufacturer of countless other items such as soap, mouthwash, hand lotion, lifesaving drugs. Although datoms are so minute that they can be seen only under the microscope, research is constantly discovering new uses for them. Intricate machines have even been designed to sort these tiny fossils according to their various shapes and sizes. The living descendants of the datam are called grass of the sea because they provide aquatic animals with much of their food. Even gigantic whales dine in deep sea luxury on these tiny [Music] plants. They multiply so rapidly a single cell becomes a billion within a month. And each of these plants contains a tiny bit of oil which it carries to the bottom of the sea when it dies. It is believed that microscopic fossils such as these are responsible for much of our supply of petroleum. Fossils have formed vast treasures beneath the earth and fossils guide us in the search to find them. But even more important, fossils have recorded the story of infinitely gradual change throughout the last 1 and a half billion years of the Earth's history, leading us to an increasing understanding of the riddle of life on our planet and perhaps someday on other planets as well. [Music] [Applause] [Music]