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National Geographic : 1993 Aug
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Geographica New Chimp Study Society's 5,000th Grant n 1890 the National Geographic Society awarded geologist Israel C. Russell $3,500 and sent him off to map Alaska's Mount St. Elias (above) and the surround ing region. The grant was the Soci ety's first in support of research and exploration. Last March the Soci ety's 5,000th grant-$12,000-went to Rosalind Alp, a 23-year-old Englishwoman (right) who is study ing chimpanzees in Sierra Leone. The grants, now made by the Committee for Research and Explo ration, have covered such topics as the distribution of army ant mites and leafhoppers, Byzantine ship wrecks, and tropical biological diversity. Primatologists Jane Good all, Birut6 Galdikas, and the late Dian Fossey all launched their pio neering studies of the great apes with Geographic aid. Alp follows in their footsteps. At 19 she participated in a tree-planting project in Sierra Leone and became fascinated by the country. She walked up to the wildlife superinten dent of Outamba-Kilimi National Park and asked for permission to do a chimpanzee survey. Gradually chimps are acclimatizing to her pres ence; she has documented several of them capturing and eating a duiker and has noted others using peeled sticks to "fish" in anthills. To get to her camp, Alp rides a motorbike about 200 miles from Freetown, then hikes 16 miles into the forest. First grantee Israel Russell, who trekked glaciers and climbed mountains 103 years ago, would smile at that. Ancient Leaves Write New History of Forests his fossil leaf looks familiar as if dropped from a maple tree in North America or Europe. But it fell about 65 million years ago on New Zealand's South Island. Its resemblance to a maple, found today almost entirely in the Northern Hemisphere, reveals nature's way of devising similar looking solutions to similar environ mental pressures, no matter how far apart in time or space, says Kirk Johnson of the Denver Museum of Natural History. Supported by a Society grant, Johnson-who had studied fossil plants in North Dakota and Mon tana that died out at the end of the age of dinosaurs-was seeking ancient plants when he discovered maple-like leaves, new to science, and other fossils that mimicked oak leaves. When they fell, New Zealand was near the Antarctic Circle and much warmer than it is today. They dropped not because of cold or lack of moisture, as leaves do today, but because there was no light for leaves to gather during the Antarctic win ter, says Johnson. He expected to find ancient leaves but not such mim ics of Northern Hemisphere trees. National Geographic, August 1993
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