□? □
[□]? □
[]? □
GRAPHIC # 1 : My research team documented the age of Bering Strait 's earliest opening by doing paleontological field work on the Alaska Peninsula of southwestern Alaska . We determined the age when Astarte migrated through Bering Strait by analyzing diatoms from within the shells of Astarte and other mollusks from Sandy Ridge . This diatom subzone has an age range of 4.8 to 5.5 million years ago , so this is the age range during which Bering Strait first opened . We also have important collections from Mexico and Central America , the Galapagos Islands , the Solomon Islands , China , Myanmar , the Philippines , and eastern Africa . We requested comments on a draft of this report from the Department of the Treasury , the Office of Management and Budget , and the agencies included in our review . As noted in this report , in crafting the act , the Congress recognized that to be useful , agency performance reports would not only need to document performance levels , but also explain and describe the reasons for any unmet goals and new plans for achieving those goals . Most recently , my research team of American and Russian paleontologists has documented that Bering Strait first opened between 4.8 and 5.5 million years ago . Scientists who study climate history have used our age for Bering Strait 's opening , and our age for the flow reversal through the strait , to fine-tune their supercomputer models of Northern Hemisphere climatic and oceanographic history . Most live in dark , moist places and are only collected by spoon-dropping after corn-starch dusting of their webs . These small to minute spiders build modified glue-sticky silk orb webs in dark , moist places .