Word: paleontologist
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...like many modern birds, on gizzard stones to do the actual chewing. Horned dinosaurs like Triceratops, which lived toward the end of the dinosaur era, in the late Cretaceous, had very inefficient jaws. "Their teeth were arranged in a vertical plane, which is very unusual," explains University of Pennsylvania paleontologist Peter Dodson. "That essentially means they were eating salad with a pair of scissors...
Dinosaur bones also hold clues to parts of the body that have disintegrated over the eons. By assessing the relationship in living animals between the vertebrae and the delicate nerves they protect, Emily Giffin, a paleontologist at Wellesley College, attempts to make inferences about the neuroanatomy of dinosaurs. Vertebrae are especially revealing because the canal running through them varies in size according to the number of nerve fibers it contains, and that in turn depends on how much the muscles controlled by these nerves are used. Giffin is trying to determine whether theropods -- the dinosaurian suborder that includes fierce predators...
There are no maybes about it as far as Robert Bakker is concerned. Long- haired, bearded and strongly opinionated, free-lance paleontologist Bakker has been the bad boy of the field for years, and does not suffer fools gladly. "There are still a few of my colleagues who think, 'If it walks like a duck, breathes like a duck and grows like a duck, it must be a turtle...
...cold-bloodedness, and they are sometimes hard to distinguish, even in living animals. Moreover, making generalizations about the relationship between an animal's activity level and its metabolism can be misleading. "We tend to think that cold-blooded animals are sluggish, but that's not very accurate," says Yale paleontologist John Ostrom. "Some snakes, lizards and crocodiles can move faster than humans can. At the same time, we tend to think that warm-blooded animals are fast and very active, but the average house cat spends a lot of time snoozing...