Who does Dr. Nedrick Jackson get a phone call from?
In the South Seas, a volcano explodes, eventually causing North Pole icebergs to shift. Below the melting polar ice caps, a 200-foot-long praying mantis, trapped in the ice for millions of years, begins to stir.  Soon after, the military personnel at Red Eagle One, a military station in northern Canada that monitors information gathered from the Distant Early Warning Line, realize that the men at one of their outposts are not responding to calls.  Commanding officer Col. Joe Parkman flies there to investigate, and finds the post destroyed, its men gone, and giant slashes left in the snow outside.
When a radar blip is sighted, Joe sends his pilots out to investigate, but their intended target disappears. Soon an Air Force plane is attacked by the deadly mantis.  He searches the wreckage, and this time, in addition to the huge slashes, finds a five-foot-long pointed object in the snow.  He takes it to General Mark Ford at the Continental Air Defense in Colorado Springs, Colorado.  Ford gathers top scientists, including Professor Anton Gunther, to examine the object, but when they cannot identify it, Gunther recommends calling in Dr. Nedrick Jackson, a paleontologist at the Museum of Natural History.
When Ned gets the call from Ford, he is helping museum magazine editor Marge Blaine plan her next issue, and dodges her questions as she begs him for a big scoop.  Later, after examining the object, Ned recognizes it as a torn-off spur from an insect's leg, and soon guesses, from evidence that the creature ate human flesh, that it must be a gigantic praying mantis.  Meanwhile, in the Arctic, the people of an Eskimo village spot the mantis in the sky, and although they hurry to their boats to escape, it swoops down and kills several men.
General Mark Ford