Expanding Evolutionary History

Expanding Evolutionary History What geologists and paleontologists can learn from the canal excavation By Andrea Gawrylewski ARTICLE EXTRAS Opening Pandora's Locks Slideshow: Expanding the world's most famous canal The Plan to Expand 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 Jarami

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By Andrea Gawrylewski

Opening Pandora's Locks

Slideshow: Expanding the world's most famous canal

The Plan to Expand

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 ...

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