Word: paleontologist
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...when the movie opens, audiences should discover that Jurassic Park has the most sophisticated dinosaurs a think tank of techno-wizards can produce and $65 million can buy. "There's no way a museum could afford what we did," says Winston. "We created the most accurate dinosaurs ever." Top paleontologists who consulted on the film agree. In most cases, says Colorado paleontologist Robert Bakker, "Spielberg made the aesthetic choice that real dinosaurs are more exciting than made-up dinosaurs...
...amber to "bring them back alive, so to speak." The experiment's success goads Hammond to exploit the made-from-concentrate behemoths for profit. He hatches the dinosaurs on a Central American island and builds a theme park around them. Before the scheduled opening, a few guests -- including craggy paleontologist Alan Grant, lissome paleobotanist Ellie Sattler and Hammond's two young grandchildren -- come to Jurassic Park for a sneak preview. Then things go spectacularly wrong. The novel's first half is a controlled tram trip through this high-tech zoo, the second half a terror- filled obstacle course strewn with...
...they could easily have been striped, spotted and brilliantly colored. Even the idea that all the dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago is now passe. Many experts believe that one resilient line is still flourishing today. The common name for these modern dinosaurs: birds. Observes Mark Norell, a paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City: "Birds are more closely related to Tyrannosaurus rex than Tyrannosaurus is to almost any dinosaur you've ever heard...
...knows what the very first true dinosaur looked like, but a young paleontologist named Paul Sereno of the University of Chicago has come closer than anyone else to finding out. In 1991, working with Argentine scientists in Ischigualasto Provincial Park at the edge of the Andes, he unearthed one of the oldest dinosaur fossils ever found. The animal, now known as Eoraptor, was a carnivore that dates from 230 million years ago. Like the much later Tyrannosaurus, the Eoraptor belonged to the saurischian, or lizard-hipped, category of dinosaurs. (The name refers to the arrangement of its pelvic bones...
...landscape. Fewer than 1.4 million of earth's tens of millions of species have been named, much less examined for their part in making the planet more hospitable. How then do we measure each loss or know when we have severed a vital link with nature? Observes noted paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould: "It would be a very bleak world with cockroaches and dogs and not much else." The final blessing of the Endangered Species Act is that it preserves the elements that stir man's sense of wonder. That benefit alone is too precious for the God Squad to barter...