Word: pompeii
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...rescuers hunted frantically amid the soupy devastation for mud-covered survivors, it was soon clear that Nevado del Ruiz would rate as one of the deadliest volcanic eruptions in all of recorded history, roughly equivalent to the A.D. 79 explosion of Mount Vesuvius, which destroyed the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum...
...Many of your viewpoints still seem profoundly affected by the events of 1969, which you describe as "the guns of Cornell," when armed weapons were brought onto the campus. You evoke these very strong images as if they were the last days of Pompeii for American higher education. How much influence did this experience have on you and your decision to write the book...
...docudrama Pompeii: The Last Day (Discovery, Jan. 30, 9 p.m. E.T.) did not set out to be a VSDM. That changed with the Indian Ocean tsunami, when entire habitations were, like the Roman city in 79 A.D., erased by a rumbling from beneath the earth's crust. A BBC co-production (as is Dirty War), Pompeii gives a scientific blow-by-blow of Vesuvius' eruption. More interestingly--and with more resonance today--it tries to tell the disaster's human story...
Luckily for paleontologists, the beds are divided into different layers that yield different sorts of fossils. The sleeping dino, for example, was found in what Mark Norell of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City calls Liaoning's "Pompeii layer," a 10-ft.-thick stratum of ash and sand. It was deposited so quickly that, like the ash from the infamous eruption in Italy, it buried creatures alive wherever they were standing--or snoozing. This one was tiny: excluding its tail, it's about the size of a Rock Cornish hen. That some of its bones have...
While the Pompeii layer preserved natural body postures, it was too coarse to take imprints of soft tissues and delicate structures, so there's no way of knowing whether Mei long had feathers. But other strata of the Liaoning fossil beds are much finer grained. That's where paleontologists found the feathered tyrannosaur, which Xu and Norell named Dilong paradoxus ("surprising emperor dragon"). It's one of the oldest known tyrannosaurs, and one of the emu-size specimens has unmistakable traces of primitive feathers on its tail and jaw. Those filaments, which are about three-quarters of an inch long...