Slideshow: Expanding the world's most famous canal
On the hills of the Culebra Cut, a few miles north of the Miraflores Locks, bulldozers and dump trucks are carting masses of soil away from the edge of the canal. Each day geologist and paleontologist Carlos Jaramillo and a team of researchers from his lab at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) pack in a Toyota truck and head to the excavation sites, searching among the dirt and sediment for their treasures: fossils. Even as the expansion of the Panama Canal causes unease for scientists who are concerned with ecology, for others, like Jaramillo and his colleagues, it's a bonanza.
When the isthmus between North and South America formed an estimated 3.5 million years ago, the resulting land bridge connected two continents of plant and animal species and triggered one of the ...
