Word: teething
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Andrea Dorfman remembers viewing Tyrannosaurus rex in New York City's American Museum of Natural History as a grade schooler, and, like millions of her peers, being "mesmerized. How could you not be captivated by those huge teeth?" she asks...
...intellectual lightweight, it senses the danger lurking in the surrounding forest. Suddenly, out from behind a tree lumbers one of the largest and fiercest carnivores that have ever lived: Tyrannosaurus rex. Although this beast is a mere adolescent, it is 15 ft. tall and armed with dagger-sharp teeth. The triceratops attempts a retreat, but the cold-blooded creature can only move slowly. It is too soon after sunrise, and the dinosaur hasn't had time to absorb the heat it needs to rouse its sluggish metabolism. While T. rex has the same problem, its longer legs enable...
...earliest dinosaurs were meat eaters, how did they evolve into herbivores -- a key to their ability to survive in a variety of environments? The arrangement of teeth and jaws was probably a major factor, and that may explain in part why dinosaurs were so successful overall. Weishampel is trying to correlate tooth design, patterns of tooth wear, the size of the mouth and other aspects of skull mechanics with the types of plants the dinosaurs might have munched. "You can get a rough feeling for how fibrous the material was that they ate, and whether they sheared, ground or pulped...
...dinosaurs' reign, which lasted from 208 million to 144 million years ago. These largest of all dinosaurs include Brontosaurus (an out-of-favor name these days: call them Apatosaurus, or risk correction by a knowledgeable six-year-old). They evidently used their spoon-shaped and pencil-shaped teeth to bite off leaves and twigs, relying, 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...
...notion that dinosaurs and birds are related dates back over a century. In 1861, quarry workers near Solnhofen, Germany, uncovered the fossil of a pigeon-size creature. Its bone structure and teeth were similar to those of dinosaurs. Yet along with the bones, the 150 million-year-old limestone in which it was trapped had also preserved the unmistakable impressions of feathers and wings. It was ultimately decided that Archaeopteryx, as it was named, was a transitional animal, related to dinosaurs but well along the evolutionary pathway to modern birds...