Tag: hard surfaces

This article was originally published in Knowable Magazine.

Conservationists seeking to restore shark populations off the Atlantic coast of Panama were facing a problem all too familiar to biologists: No records existed to document what pristine shark communities looked like before overfishing decimated the animals over the past few decades. Without that information, how could the restoration workers know what they should be aiming for?

Erin Dillon, a paleoecologist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, thought she had