Word: sereno
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...dinosaurs may have been dominated by dinosaurs, but they certainly weren't the only fearsome creatures around. A series of remarkable discoveries from a team led by Paul Sereno, a paleontologist at the University of Chicago and a National Geographic explorer-in-residence, has made it clear that another, less celebrated group of animals lived alongside the dinos, and sometimes even dined on those better-known cousins...
...Raptorex came to light, meanwhile, is a story in itself. About three years ago, Sereno, who usually does his own fossil-hunting, was approached by ophthalmologist and avid fossil collector Henry Kriegstein for help in identifying a newly purchased specimen. Kriegstein had bought the fossil legally, but when Sereno saw it, he became convinced it was from China and that it had almost certainly been smuggled out of that country. "I told him that I'd help," says Sereno, "but only if he was willing to donate the fossil to science and let us return it to China when...
Kriegstein agreed. Sereno, in turn, gave the remarkable specimen Kriegstein's surname (in honor of his parents, Holocaust survivors who are still alive), and listed Kriegstein as a co-author on perhaps the most important paleontology paper of the year. "In the normal course of things," says Sereno, "this fossil could have ended up on someone's mantelpiece or been forgotten in an attic somewhere and lost to science. Now China gets its property back, and Dr. Kriegstein has found immortality for his family. Everybody wins...
...looked and acted like; they also want to know how they fit into their environment. From what scientists already know about the ancient lake beds where Raptorex was originally found, for example, they know it had some stiff competition. "They would have co-existed with velociraptor-like dinosaurs," says Sereno - the human-scale carnivores that starred in Jurassic Park. But they would have hunted very differently: velociraptors, Sereno explains, "had long, grasping arms with clawed hands." They also had a large, sickle-shaped claw on their middle toes, probably used for slashing prey. It was most likely only after...
...them range farther and crunch the bones of the biggest prey, there was no competition at all. By about 90 million years ago at the latest, T. rex - or as we might now say, the king-size version of Raptorex - was unchallenged. "There was no turning back," says Sereno, referring to the leading theory on why the dinosaurs became extinct, "until the comet...