Word: dinosaurs
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Thanks largely to the explosion of information, dinosaurs are more popular than ever -- if that's possible. In light of the new insights, museums around the world are revamping musty exhibits or installing new ones. They are rearranging the old stilted skeletons on display into new dynamic poses and adding such modern attractions as robotic dinos and interactive computer games. Dinosaur theme parks are booming, while toy stores overflow with stuffed stegosauruses, dinosaur puzzles and models, not to mention the omnipresent videosaurus Barney. And early in June, dino-mania will reach fever pitch with the premiere of Steven Spielberg...
...rage for dinosaurs is hardly new. The British anatomist Richard Owen first coined the term dinosaur (from the ancient Greek deinos, "terrible," and sauros, "lizard") in 1841 to characterize gigantic fossilized bones found several decades earlier. Dinosaur bones and footprints had actually been known for centuries, but were ascribed to dragons or extinct lizards or even giant ravens. Owen realized that these enormous bones belonged to a previously unknown and long-extinct group of animals related to but different from lizards. Dinosaurs became an immediate rage in London. An 1854 exhibition at Hyde Park's Crystal Palace featured a number...
...early dinosaur experts were hampered, however, by a shortage of fossils, and they made egregious mistakes about what the creatures looked like. Owen believed, for example, that Iguanodon, a grazing beast some 30 ft. in length, was built something like a hippopotamus, with a small, sharp horn on its nose. Half a century later, scientists decided the creature was shaped more like a kangaroo and the horn was really a misplaced claw that belonged on its forefoot. Now they think it was probably four-footed after...
...knows what the very first true dinosaur looked like, but a young paleontologist named Paul Sereno of the University of Chicago has come closer than anyone else to finding out. In 1991, working with Argentine scientists in Ischigualasto Provincial Park at the edge of the Andes, he unearthed one of the oldest dinosaur fossils ever found. The animal, now known as Eoraptor, was a carnivore that dates from 230 million years ago. Like the much later Tyrannosaurus, the Eoraptor belonged to the saurischian, or lizard-hipped, category of dinosaurs. (The name refers to the arrangement of its pelvic bones...
...traditional way to understand dinosaurs is through their bones, the only body parts that are preserved and converted into rock by the process of fossilization. The way bones fit together can reveal how an animal's joints worked, how its limbs moved, what kind of food it ate and how agile it was. Comparisons with living animals are also invaluable. "To understand dinosaur bones, you must take apart living animals," asserts paleontologist David Weishampel, who teaches anatomy at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. "Fossils don't come with instruction kits...