Word: brontosauruses
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Take sauropods, for example, the four-legged, long-necked giants that flourished in the Jurassic, the middle period of the dinosaurs' reign, which lasted from 208 million to 144 million years ago. These largest of all dinosaurs include Brontosaurus (an out-of-favor name these days: call them Apatosaurus, or risk correction by a knowledgeable six-year-old). They evidently used their spoon-shaped and pencil-shaped teeth to bite off leaves and twigs, relying, like many modern birds, on gizzard stones to do the actual chewing. Horned dinosaurs like Triceratops, which lived toward the end of the dinosaur...
...first, credit must be given where credit is due. The council does a fine job in its administrative functions. To cope with Harvard's brontosaurus Holyoke Center bureaucracy is no small task, and the council's administration of grants and loans for student activity is truly exemplary...
...hoary belief involves dinosaur stupidity: the hapless creatures died out because their bodies continued to grow bigger while their brains remained small. Indeed, cranium measurements seem to indicate that at least some species were not terribly cerebral: one type of brontosaurus, for example, weighed about 30 tons, and probably had only a half-pound brain. If the dinosaurs did indeed become progressively less intelligent, the theory goes, they would have lost the ability to adapt to changes in the environment...
...PROBLEM IS that great universities, or rather those that would sooner appear great than be great, hum along towards the intellectual frontier with all the speed and grace of a brontosaurus. Harvard is notorious, particularly in the English Department, for sitting tight and hoping whatever's new and exciting will go away with next year's graduates. But that strategy hasn't paid off with all the permutations of New Criticism, which refused to crawl away and die, and the odds aren't in the department's favor now. As it is, students are deserting the English Department in large...
...most fearsome of these creatures were carnivores, like the ferocious Tyrannosaurus, which seems to have feasted on its fellow dinosaurs. Others, like the long-necked Brontosaurus, the archetypal dinosaur of cartoons, were gentle, browsing vegetarians. In spite of their comparatively small brains, dinosaurs were not dumb, floundering brutes. Deinonychus, for instance, was a fleet, two-footed creature with scimitar-like claws on its hind legs, grasping hands and dagger-sharp teeth. It apparently hunted in packs, in the manner of wolves. Stegoceras perhaps employed the thick dome on its skull in sexual combat, as an elk uses its horns. Dinosaurs...