Word: dinosaurs
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...Dead for sure," one insider put it. The dinosaur everyone loves to hate was a "one-year phenom" that ran headlong into extinction this season, thanks to overlicensing (the Purple One's image appeared on every product you can think of), a very narrow demographic base and "parental revolt...
Anyone who thought Jurassic Park was farfetched should talk to molecular biologist Scott Woodward. In last week's Science, Woodward announced that he had isolated DNA from an ancient creature that he was 90% sure was a dinosaur. If enough of it were collected, such a sample could, in theory, be cloned into a living specimen -- just like in the movies. Woodward, an associate professor at Brigham Young University, extracted the DNA from two bone fragments found in a Utah coal mine, where they had been protected by muck and never fossilized...
...does this mean that a dinosaur assembly plant is on the way? Don't hold your breath. The sections of DNA that Woodward collected are much too short for any practical use. The full complement of genes needed to create an organism contains billions of nucleic acid pairs. Woodward found 174 pairs, too few to be certain what animal they came from. "The pieces are so short that you can't say they are like one thing or another," says Ward Wheeler, a molecular biologist at the American Museum of Natural History. "It could be a turtle or a mammal...
Another clue to the monster's motherly instincts may come from two tiny skulls that Norell found in the nest. They belong to a different type of predatory dinosaur known as dromaeosaurs. While they could have been egg stealers themselves, they could also have been brought in by the mother oviraptor as food. Or they might have emerged from eggs sneaked into the nest by a mother dromaeosaur so her young could be raised by unsuspecting surrogate parents -- a strategy used by modern cuckoos...
Even if there had been no other fossils in the nest, the discovery of an embryonic oviraptor would have been important. Dinosaur embryos are rare -- fewer than a dozen kinds have ever been found. Juvenile animals often have features that vanish as the creatures grow, but which also exist in the embryos of their precursors or descendants (human fetuses, for example, start out with tiny tails). If researchers can find common traits in unhatched dinosaurs and birds, they will be able to establish stronger links between them...