Word: paleontologist
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...example, was only 40% complete). Once the skeleton is fully excavated in a year or so, experts should be able to pin down the relative sizes of different body parts and see just which of the creature's features were apelike and which were human. It is, says paleontologist Alan Walker of Pennsylvania State University, "perhaps one of the best finds ever...
...southern hemisphere (and an exponential jump in the existing worldwide inventory of only five specimens). What's more, the beautifully preserved bits and pieces include tiny (about a tenth of an inch long), pencil-shaped teeth and mosaics of precise, miniature, lizard-like scales. Says American Museum paleontologist Luis Chiappe, another of the team's co-leaders: "Finding dinosaur embryos is rare enough. Finding the [soft, perishable] tissue that surrounded those bones is truly spectacular...
...survived, they would have been about 15 in. long at birth--"about the size of a small poodle," says Chiappe--but 40 ft. to 50 ft. from the tips of their giraffe-like necks to the ends of their long, ground-hugging tails in adulthood. The third team leader, paleontologist Rodolfo Coria of Argentina's Museo Municipal Carmen Funes, identifies them more specifically as titanosaurs, smaller versions of sauropods that were common in the area...
...eggs haphazardly or carefully arranged their nests to protect them from meat-eating predators or the crushing feet of passing females. What seems clear, in any case, is that the herds of sauropods formed nesting groups, like the duck-billed maiasaurs ("good-mother lizards") discovered in western Montana by paleontologist John Horner of the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman. "It's a survival strategy," says Horner, adding admiringly, "it would have been quite a sight...
...dark alley: 36 feet long, built like a T. rex, a hundred teeth sharp as razors, claws the size of your foot. He's Suchomimus tererensis, an entirely new breed of dinosaur to be unveiled Friday in the journal Science. Suchomimus was discovered -? bit by fossilized bit -? by paleontologist Paul Sereno in Niger, Africa, last year. Now that he's been shipped whole to the States, the world will hear him roar. "With its forearms and its jaws, it would have been able to take down just about anything," said Sereno, a professor at the University of Chicago...