Word: dinosaurs
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This eminent dino digger was as awestruck as any Barney-balmy child when he saw modelmaker Winston's 9,000-lb. 40-ft.-long Tyrannosaurus rex model. "It was the closest I've ever been to a live dinosaur," he avers. He was standing a few feet from the resting T. rex when its head jerked up with startling speed and swung back and forth, alert and lifelike. "It came up real fast, its eyes dilated, its skin was twitching. When you see it, it doesn't take much imagination to get beyond the fantasy. I jumped about 10 feet...
...million worth of marketing won't bring the movie, or the creatures, to life. That is the responsibility of the swamis of special effects -- the puppeteers, modelmakers and computer mavens -- working closely with enthusiastic experts. Phil Tippett, an animator and longtime dinosaur buff, would whisper admonitions after nearly every take: "The head would never move like that," or "The claw wouldn't extend that far." He was the chief enforcer of Spielberg's dictum: that the dinosaurs be animals, not monsters...
...model T. was a dinosaur in another sense; it may represent a vanishing craft. "A model can never be a full, performing creature," says Mark Dippe, a visual-effects supervisor at Industrial Light & Magic. "But computer-generated creatures can run, hop, do anything." To bone up on dinosaurs, Dippe and his colleagues studied the movements of live elephants, rhinos and giraffes and watched footage of alligators tearing meat apart. Ace animator Steve Williams even kept an iguana in his office -- for research, not company...
...most recent visit, however, interviewing paleontologists Mark Norell and Michael Novacek for this week's cover story, the dinosaur halls were closed -- and for the very reason, she notes with some satisfaction, that drove our story. "They're being overhauled to reflect all the new information in the field...
...Summit. Still, Dorfman, who keeps a small collection of fossils herself, has a fondness for things that come out of the past to enlighten the present. Without old bones, Dorfman points out, we wouldn't have realized that "every time you order chicken for dinner, you're actually ordering dinosaur...