Word: dinosaurs
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Finally, while size records aren't supposed to be high on paleontologists' agenda, the immensity of C. saharicus does bear on dinosaur evolution, especially when it's put into context. Last fall paleontologists working in South America found a similarly huge carnivore, called Giganotosaurus, that was said to be a little larger than T. rex (in fact, the sizes of all three giants probably overlapped). "What's interesting," observes Norell, "is that everywhere you go in the world you have these truly enormous carnivorous dinosaurs that were much larger than any terrestrial carnivores since." One implication, says Sereno: "I think...
Digging up dinosaur bones is always a grueling business, but conditions in the Kem Kem wilderness of southwest Morocco last summer were especially bad. The temperature soared to 120 degrees F almost every day, and the fossils were hundreds of feet up, poking out of the dusty face of a sandstone cliff. "It was," says Paul Sereno of the University of Chicago, who led the joint U.S.-Moroccan expedition, "the most brutal fieldwork I've ever done." Worse yet, the team wasn't finding much--lots of moderately interesting bits and pieces but nothing even close to a major discovery...
Super size and speed make the finds perfect fodder for the evening news and for the imaginations of eight-year-old dino devotees. But scientists are more interested in what the discoveries, reported last week in the journal Science and in National Geographic, say about where dinosaurs lived and how they evolved. "We have a pretty good record from North America, Asia and South America," says paleontologist Mark Norell of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. "But we're just now starting to get a picture of the dinosaur fauna of Africa...
Scientists are finding lots of surprises. The facial bones and teeth of the tyrannosaur-topping dinosaur, it turns out, are the same as those of a rare species, called Carcharodontosaurus saharicus ("shark-toothed reptile from the Sahara"), which were found in Egypt in the 1920s but destroyed during World War II. The new skull not only establishes the animal's size but also proves that the huge dinosaur had a comparably huge home range that spanned all of North Africa...
...chasing was chasing him. No, this is not one of those scary scenes from the movie Twister, which opened in theaters across the country last week (see review). Rather, it is a slice of the real-life science that inspired Michael Crichton and Steven Spielberg, creators of the dinosaur blockbuster Jurassic Park, to make the movie in the first place. For Davies-Jones is not some casual thrill seeker but a serious scientist at the National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL) in Norman, Oklahoma. Over the past 2 1/2 decades, he and his colleagues have revolutionized the study of tornadoes, teaching...