Section B (Jkg UtafTCtl iRpCOfi Section B
Wednesday, November 14, 1984 ^ ^ * >^vw-^r^ Wednesday, November
Ninety million years separate three fossil
Linuparus lobsters from their modern relative, the
one with antennae. In comparing them, paleontologist
Gale Bishop, left, and zoologist Austin Wil
liams discovered that time and distance have
barely changed them. They were found thousands of
miles apart.
It s Time To Make Plans
For Shopping For Holidays
You'll have more time
to enjoy the season if
you get a headstart on
baking, say food and
nutrition specialists at
North Carolina State
University.
It isn't necessary to do
all of the baking ahead
of time. In fact, some of
the products will have a
better taste if they are
frozen unbaked.
Spices and condiments
in unbaked
doughs and batters lose
their flavor in freezing,
especially those in
moister types of dough.
This means unbaked
frozen doughs can't be
kept in the freezer as
long as the baked
products, but unbaked
doughs vill also take up
less space.
Pastries heavy in fat,
such as pies, tarts, filled
rings and rich cookies,
come through freezing
well baked or unbaked.
To freeze whole pies,
brush the inside of the
bottom crust with shortening
to prevent sogginess.
Fruit pies freeze better
unbaked. Leave the
silt or prick of the top
until it's baked. The best
pie fillings for freezing
are fresh fruit, mincemeat
or squash.
Chiffon will freeze if it
has a half cup of whipping
cream in the filling
for an 8-inch pie.
Custard and cream pies
don't freeze well, and
any pre-cooked filling
that contains starch
should be thoroughly
cooked before freezing.
Fillings for unbaked
pies should have one and
a half times more
tapioca or cornstarch
than usual. If fruit will
brown, add powered
ascorbic acid to the
filling.
Pie crusts may be
frozen in cubes, but
either baked or unbaked
pie shells are more convenient
although they
take up more freezer
space.
Cookie dough and
baked cookies may both
be frozen successfully,
especially those high in
fat and low in moisture.
Baked cookies should be
cooled and packed in
rigid containers with
tight-fitting lids. Thin
cookies will thaw in
minutes; bar cookies in
opened containers take
an hour.
Cake batter may be
frozen, but this is not
recommended because
the flavor and degree of
rising after freezing is
unpredictable. Unfrosted
baked cakes
freeze the best. Frosted
cakes tend to become
soggy. Spice cake is the
least satisfactory if
stored over six weeks,
because the spice
flavors change in the
freezer.
The frosting can be
made ahead of time and
frozen separately.
Frostings and fillings
made from uncooked
confectioner's sugar
and butter mixtures
freeze well. Candy-type
frostings are good if
frozen no more than 3 to
4 weeks. (If you try to
keep them frozen
longer, they will crack.)
Egg-based, boiled or
brown sugar icings
freeze poorly and
become sticky or grainy
when thawed.
These Look-Alike Lobsters
Span 90-Million-Year Era
By JOY ASCHENBACH
National Geographic News Service
WASHINGTON — Sometimes you don't have to
get your feet wet to look for lobsters. Instead, you
put on cowboy boots and head inland to cattle and
sheep ranches in the northern Black Hills.
Lobsters in South Dakota? There are hundreds
lying out there on the open range—bits of tails, legs
and bodies hardened into clay-like nuggets barely
distinguishable from the dry, cracked earth.
They're 90-million-year-old fossilized remains
from the tune when South Dakota was a sea bed,
when the ancient Gulf of Mexico reached north into
Canada. It's a different version of "surf and turf."
These lobsters aren't edible, of course. But other
members of their genus, Linuparus, are still crawling
about the oceans today, though only in waters
thousands of miles away, in the South China Sea and
the Indian and Pacific oceans, off Africa and
Australia.
From Time Of Dinosaurs
"linuparus is a rare living fossil. It was around
with the dinosaurs and it's practically unchanged
throughout a tremendous span of time," says
paleontologist Gale A. Bishop, who has spent two
summers on the South Dakota range picking up the
black fossilized pieces that ranchers call "spider
rocks."
Linuparus lobsters are not the famous big-clawed
American lobsters found off the New England
coast. They have no claws and are harvested
primarily for their tail meat. They belong to the
family popularly known as spiny or rock lobsters,
which inhabit tropical and warm temperate waters.
"It's incredible to be able to still see such
primitive lobsters alive today and possibly have the
chance to study the biology of something that lived
millions of years ago, to see how they eat, mate, and
live," says Bishop.
Why did Linuparus lobsters, like horseshoe crabs,
for example, survive so long unchanged, and why
are they found today only in the South China Sea and
Indo-Pacific region? No one yet has the answers.
Bishop believes in starting at the beginBishop
believes in starting at the beginning—
when the lobsters first crawled along the sea bottom.
They are known to have existed in both North
Cretaceous Period (about 130 million years ago) to
the Early Eocene, about 50 million years ago.
Tn western South Dakota, Bishop has discovered a
"lobster zone" along a narrow 54-mile-long strip of
land. To collect the thousands of 90-million-year-old
fragments, he and field assistant Brian Meyer
covered at least five miles a day on foot. The
research is supported in part by the National
Geographic Society.
Pieces In A Puzzle
A professor of geology at Georgia Southern College
in Statesboro, Bishop is gluing together the
pieces of these 3-D jigsaw puzzles in his campus lab.
A single foot-long lobster may have broken into 30
pieces or more. He has about 400 at least partially
complete lobsters from South Dakota.
Fossilized Linuparus specimens also have been
found near Dallas, Texas, in northern Mississippi,
and along the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal.
All of these areas were under water when the North
American landmass was split in two by the western
interior seaway.
The ancient lobsters in North America lived in
shallow waters in the oozy, soft sea bottom,
probably on a diet of shellfish.
Today Linuparus live in a similar muddy environment,
but in much deeper waters at depths of 250 to
1,000 feet, says zoologist Austin B. Williams of the
National Marine Fisheries Service. Williams is
collaborating with Bishop in comparing the fossils
with the only three Linuparus species still known to
exist. There are 27 extinct species.
Because of the depths at which they now live,
today's Linuparus Lobsters are more difficult to
reach than their 90-million-year-old ancestors on
dry land. A very small amount get caught with the
400 million pounds of lobsters that make up the
world's average annual catch, says Williams. They
show up primarily among frozen lobster tails from
Japan.
To observe their behavior would require the use of
a camera-equipped submersible. Bishop and Williams
theorize that the lobsters still look and live so
much like their ancestors because their habitat,
though deeper, probably has not changed, and their
food resources have remained stable.
Whether the lobsters migrate to the Indo-Pacific
from North America or were always there is not
known.
At this point, Bishop has seen more fossilized lobsters
than live Linuparus. And he has yet to taste a
morsel of sweet Linuparus.