Although the basic elements of the framework document are still there, both sides have already scrutinised the brief text of the new proposals like palaeontologists poring over a fossil record.

ECONOMIST: The end of the beginning

Future landers might investigate the spots for signs of a Martian fossil record.

CNN: Race to Mars begins a distant search for life

He explained that it filled a gap in the fossil record, demonstrating that dinosaurs split into their three major groups - theropods, sauropodomorphs and ornithischians - very early in their evolution.

BBC: T.rex 'little cousin' discovered

The discovery fills a gap in the fossil record and raises intriguing questions about the evolution of animals on both Madagascar and India, which separated at about the time this newly identified creature walked the Earth.

BBC: Dinosaur 'fills fossil record gap'

According to early estimates by the International Energy Agency (IEA), global CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion reached a record high of 31.6 gigatons in 2011, a 3.2 percent increase over 2010.

FORBES: Debunking 3 Myths About U.S. Emissions

"Whereas most of us have to deal with disjointed sentences and occasional fractured words to reconstruct the volumes of the fossil record, you've got a whole chapter lying there and you can flick through the pages at your leisure, " he said.

BBC: Dinosaur mummy yields its secrets

Ms Werning therefore decided to trace the phenomenon of rapid growth back as far as she could in the fossil record, by examining the bones of a wide variety of species.

ECONOMIST: Or, rather, the dinosaur and the crocodile

Gould, a palaeontologist, observed that there are long periods of stasis in the fossil record, which is true, and inferred from this that selfish genery is therefore wrong because it predicts continual change, which is questionable.

ECONOMIST: Richard Dawkins under fire

They first appear in the fossil record hundreds of thousand of years ago and, at their peak, dominated a wide range, spanning Britain and Iberia in the west to Israel in the south and Uzbekistan in the east.

BBC: Last-stand Neanderthals queried