Word: giant
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...transport planes of the U.S. Air Force's Air Mobility Command -- used to ship supplies and personnel to Bosnia and Somalia -- have been working almost nonstop since the Persian Gulf War, and now some of the giant C-141s and C-5s are showing worrisome wing cracks and other signs of fatigue. The Air Force is still struggling to catch up on maintenance that had been scheduled two years < ago but was interrupted by the Kuwait crisis. Said one C-141 pilot: "If we were a union, there's no way this carrier could continue flying...
...million a year in revenue. In February Nike, along with Michael Jordan, wrestled from the N.B.A. the rights to the multimillion-dollar market for T shirts bearing Jordan's image. "In marketing, Nike is far more powerful than the league," says N.B.A. deputy commissioner Russ Granik. "They are the giant, and we're the mouse." Player representatives, seeing endorsement money rolling in to Nike athletes, are loath to criticize the company. "There are no rules barring what Nike is doing," says Charles Grantham, executive director of the N.B.A. Players Association...
...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 of life-size dinosaur models that drew...
During the Triassic period -- say, 225 million years ago -- it would have seemed absurd to suggest that dinosaurs would soon inherit the earth. At the time, they were inconsequential creatures, perhaps the size of dogs, living among far more imposing giant crocodiles and other reptiles. During Triassic times, the continents were stuck together in a single mass that scientists call Pangaea. The planet was warmer and rainier than it is today -- ideal conditions for the growth of vast forests along coastlines and adjacent to rivers. Conifers, horsetails, tree ferns and ginkgos were the dominant vegetation. Giant 3-ft. dragonflies whirred...
Another idea, posited by David Norman, director of the Sedgwick Museum at the University of Cambridge: the giant, established herbivores may have overgrazed their customary food plants, giving the newly evolving flowering plants a chance to compete. Says Norman: "It's rather an exaggeration, but you could say that in a sense dinosaurs might have invented flowering plants...