My Big Fat Lemon

In addition, Dominguez-Rodrigo initially compared trampling damage to butchery marks produced by human-made stone tools, not stones with naturally sharp edges. Lucy’s kind probably collected sharp stones rather than making them, in Marean’s view. Stones that happen to have sharp edges create butchery marks resembling much of the damage on the Dikika bones, he asserts. Both Dikika fossils were surface finds. It’s hard to know whether they originally rested in a nearby sand bed — as argued by their discoverers — or came loose from harder sediment, Dominguez-Rodrigo says. If the fossils broke free from surrounding material, abrasive soil could have created many of the cuts and scratches attributed to stone tools, he suggests.

The Old Weather Project, launched in October, scanned 4,000 logbooks from 280 Royal Navy ships. Like the crowdsourcing project GalaxyZoo, which asks web visitors to classify pictures of galaxies, online users can read a page and type in, from a shipman’s scrawled notes, the temperature and pressure measurements from that day. In the first three weeks users digitized 100,000 pages and completed log books from three ships — 8 percent of the total data. A smaller Swiss project called Data.Rescue@Home  is soliciting citizen scribes to interpret data from German weather balloons during World War II and from a meteorological station in the Soloman Islands that operated during the first half of the 20th century.

Those conclusions rest on comparisons of damage to the Dikika bones with animal bones trampled in a 2009 study directed by Dominguez-Rodrigo. Three men of varying weights, wearing shoes with soles covered by coarse grass, walked across deer bones that had been placed in a sandy mix similar to the Dikika sand bed. Two minutes of trampling resulted in long, thin indentations that were shaped in cross-section. Animal butchery with stone tools rarely results in such bone damage, but signature trampling marks appear on the Dikika bones, Dominguez-Rodrigo says. Incisions attributed to butchery by Marean don’t look like typical trampling marks, but cuts such as those still sometimes appear on experimentally trampled bones, Dominguez-Rodrigo adds. During a census, a group of people or other animals get counted. A census of a particular country is used to figure out how many people live there, which means that somewhere, people spend a lot of time counting.

For the last ten years, a large group of scientists have also spent a lot of time counting. They’ve been working on an exploration of creatures that live underwater. The project is called the Census of Marine Life, and the research was designed to answer three main questions. What did live in the oceans? What does live in the oceans? What will live in the oceans?