Word: dinosaurs
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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...
...Dinosaur bones also hold clues to parts of the body that have disintegrated over the eons. By assessing the relationship in living animals between the vertebrae and the delicate nerves they protect, Emily Giffin, a paleontologist at Wellesley College, attempts to make inferences about the neuroanatomy of dinosaurs. Vertebrae are especially revealing because the canal running through them varies in size according to the number of nerve fibers it contains, and that in turn depends on how much the muscles controlled by these nerves are used. Giffin is trying to determine whether theropods -- the dinosaurian suborder that includes fierce predators...
...current consensus is that dinosaurs were not strictly ectothermic but fell short of full-fledged endothermy. "The problem," notes Michael Brett- Surman of the Smithsonian Institution, "is that there is no such thing as 'the dinosaur.' There were seven groups living 150 million years ago that started out as one thing and perhaps evolved into something else." Although Deinonychus, Velociraptor and other small, meat-eating bipeds may have been warm-blooded, Brett-Surman believes large predators like Tyrannosaurus rex, which went through three vastly different growth stages, may have been equipped with a variable metabolism...
...when Jack Horner happened upon 14 rocky nests in an eastern Montana excavation that was later dubbed Egg Mountain, another dinosaur myth bit the dust. The egg-filled nests belonged to hadrosaurs -- duck-billed dinosaurs -- which had apparently built vast rookeries much the way social birds like penguins do. Though dinosaurs were never thought to be especially cuddly or caring, these creatures clearly nurtured their young, probably feeding them by mouth like baby birds until they were strong enough to leave the nest. Horner and his colleagues named the species Maiasaura -- Greek for "Good Mother Lizard...
...comes Mononychus, one of the fruits of the first Western expeditions into the Mongolian Gobi in 60 years. "Central Asia probably has the greatest dinosaur-yielding potential of any area in the world," says Michael Novacek, dean of science at the American Museum of Natural History, who went to the Gobi in 1990 and has returned every year since. "There are areas the size of Montana that haven't even been prospected. You could spend a whole lifetime there...