Word: sereno
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...little larger than T. rex (in fact, the sizes of all three giants probably overlapped). "What's interesting," observes Norell, "is that everywhere you go in the world you have these truly enormous carnivorous dinosaurs that were much larger than any terrestrial carnivores since." One implication, says Sereno: "I think we're looking at the Olympic-size limit for this sort of animal. It's telling us that this is the largest they could grow and still survive." Or at least, that's where the evidence points today. Given that Africa's dinosaurs are just now coming to light...
...grueling business, but conditions in the Kem Kem wilderness of southwest Morocco last summer were especially bad. The temperature soared to 120 degrees F almost every day, and the fossils were hundreds of feet up, poking out of the dusty face of a sandstone cliff. "It was," says Paul Sereno of the University of Chicago, who led the joint U.S.-Moroccan expedition, "the most brutal fieldwork I've ever done." Worse yet, the team wasn't finding much--lots of moderately interesting bits and pieces but nothing even close to a major discovery...
...explorers had unearthed the virtually complete skeleton of a previously unknown predator. It was a 27-ft.-long monster similar in size to the North American Allosaurus but far leaner and presumably quicker as well; the scientists named it Deltadromeus agilis, or "agile delta runner." A few days later, Sereno came up with an even more spectacular find: the skull of another meat eater whose head, at least, was a shade bigger than that of the 45-ft.-long Tyrannosaurus rex, traditionally considered the largest predator ever to have walked the earth...
...Punto Sereno," a group of Puerto Rican and Hispanic teenage dancers...
...species late in the Triassic period. It could have been caused by the impact of a massive asteroid or comet, perhaps, or by dramatic climate changes triggered as Pangaea separated to form distinct continents. As other animals disappeared wholesale, the dinosaurs evolved rapidly to fill vacant ecological niches. Says Sereno: "It's very difficult to argue that the dinosaurs had something the others didn't. Instead of evolving because they were better, maybe they evolved because there was a sudden vacuum." For whatever reason, the early mammals, although they arose at about the same period, remained bit players...