Word: paleontologist
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...fanciful premise of Jurassic Park -- that DNA could be recovered from fossils and cloned to create live dinosaurs -- has already turned into partial truth. Jack Horner, the paleontologist who advised Steven Spielberg on the movie, thinks he has found red blood cells in a chunk of Tyrannosaurus bone, and extractable DNA might be inside them. The cloning part is still fantasy, but the DNA could be used to test the theory that dinosaurs and birds are closely related...
...Kongfrontation), The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, Godzilla, Bringing Up Baby -- this one sometimes creaks when it's not playing with the beasties. For the first half-hour -- the preshow before the thrill ride -- you are advised to bide your time. Screenwriter David Koepp's subplot, in which a paleontologist (Sam Neill) is force-fed lessons in fatherhood by his paleobotanist girlfriend (Laura Dern), is laid on with a trowel. And the plot occasionally beggars belief. If you were up a huge tree and a van were teetering on the branch above you, would you race down the side...
...joint." But he was also the first in the business to decide to turn up the lights on the casino floor, and the only one ever to write a ballet about the history of Las Vegas. In his name dropping, he is just as likely to mention Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould as he is Sinatra...
...China's leading paleontologist, Dong Zhiming, believes some meat eaters too may have been caring parents. In fact, he takes the contrarian view that Oviraptor, a toothless predator whose very name means egg stealer, is the victim of a bum rap. The sharp-clawed creature has been found in close proximity to nests not because it was poised to devour unhatched babies but because "it was the mother and was protecting them," says Dong...
Mononychus may be the discovery of a lifetime. The turkey-size predator, ! with its mouthful of sharp teeth and long tail, looked quite similar to the theropods. Even so, says paleontologist Mark Norell, it shares a number of features with modern birds. "In Archaeopteryx, for example," he explains, "the fibula ((the thin bone in the leg)) touches the ankle. In birds that doesn't happen, and the same is true of Mononychus. Birds have a keeled sternum ((or breastbone)), where the flight muscles attach. Mononychus also had a keeled sternum." Some of Mononychus' wristbones were fused together, which is another...