As JURASSIC WORLD roars in theaters, scientists again debate whether dinosaurs were killed by an asteroid or by volcanos The current film hit Jurassic World, like the three dinosaur thrillers before it, involves killing a lot of dinosaurs running amuck on an isolated island. Ignoring Lewis Carroll’s warning to “shun the frumious Bandersnatch,” scientists on… Read More »
It was a beautiful Sunday morning, the air full of Spring, a perfect time for my wife and I to go to the Zoo and check out the new dinosaur exhibit. Set up in an enclosed area within The River’s Edge, the temporary exhibit presents a dozen dynamic dinosaur models, scaled down to child size,… Read More »
The turkey on your Thanksgiving table is a dinosaur! Yesterday, for Thanksgiving, my family ate a 20 pound dinosaur. Actually, before it was skinned, with feet and head and innards, it probably weighed more like 25 pounds. Meleagris gallopavo, biologists call it. It tasted good, for dinosaur. Used to be, when I was a kid,… Read More »
Few things in science are more fun than a good argument. Scientists are a scrappy lot, by and large, and thoroughly enjoy the give-and-take of contesting ideas. One of the fiercer debates among palentologists (scientists who study fossils) has focused on wether or not dinosaurs were warm blooded. Humans like you and I are said… Read More »
If you happen to be one of the very small number of people that sit around wondering what kind of heart dinosaurs had, last Friday was your lucky day. A team of researchers from North Carolina say they have found one – a fossil dinosaur heart. Because soft tissues rarely form fossils, we know little… Read More »
I was forced to learn to spell archaeopteryx in 1989, when my daughter Nikki came home from first grade at Meremac School reciting “A-R-C-H-A-E-O-P-T-E-R-Y-X.” Her class was just starting to learn to spell, and the teacher assigned them that word right off the bat. “If you can spell archaeopteryx,” she told them, “you can spell… Read More »
