Word: dinosaures
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...whose name comes from the very service they used when combining their contributions while both artists toured separately, would have to change their name. This sort of thing happens in rock, and has led to the English Beat’s name change from the Beat, and Dinosaur Jr.’s name change from Dinosaur. Question: have you heard of the Beat? Have you heard of Dinosaur? But to avoid what probably would have not been so big a deal—or possibly to get Ben Gibbard to stop crying—an agreement was reached: Postal...
...cohort have taught TV new visual tricks, raised its production standards and perhaps shown the dinosaur networks a way to survive the swarm of nimble cable competitors. The CSIs have made network drama more consistent. But they have also--cop show after doctor-cop show after military-cop show--made it more homogeneous. They have taught TV to tell entertaining, simple stories without dumbing them down--and left the networks uninterested in much besides simple stories. The CSI effect has produced TV that looks 21st century but is as conventional as a rerun of Mannix. In some ways...
That notion is reinforced, albeit indirectly, by the growth analysis Norell and a group of American and Canadian scientists published in Nature in August. By looking at growth lines--skeletal marks, analogous to tree rings, that show how much bigger a dinosaur got from year to year--the scientists were able to estimate that T. rex packed on weight at a blistering pace, sometimes as much as 5 lbs. a day. That also supports the idea of warm-bloodedness, which means baby T. rex had to have a way to retain body heat. As the dinosaur shot toward adulthood, however...
Impressive as these new discoveries are, they hardly mean that all the details of the dinosaur-bird link have been ironed out. While current thinking favors speedy predators like velociraptors as the direct ancestors of modern birds, both Chiappe and Norell argue that the birds' forebears could just as easily have been troodontids like Mei long or even oviraptors, another related type of dinosaur. (Several years ago in Mongolia, Norell and colleagues unearthed a fossil oviraptor sitting on its egg-filled nest.) And then there's also the open question of how flight evolved. Mei long, says Chiappe, was clearly...
Those are important points, and they may take years to work out. But the fact that paleontologists are focusing on such details makes it clear that the dinosaur-bird connection, so bitterly controversial just a few short years ago, is no longer in dispute. --Reported by Andrea Dorfman/New York