Word: velociraptors
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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James Huth (age 8, brother of Phoebe, son of Professor Huth) had more complicated plans: "I'm gonna be a Velociraptor with wings, from the ad on TV with the mutant dinosaurs. Me and my family made it--it's actually some green clothes with spray paint and cardboard...
...Last year she repeated the experience with a cover updating the conventional wisdom about dinosaurs; Alexander has had similar success with a cover exploring the dawn of life. Notes Wallis: "If you have a new artifact to look at -- the skull of an early hominid, the talon of a velociraptor -- you can engage in a thrilling kind of time traveling. Add some evocative writing, and readers can be transported...
...they took a little artistic license. Velociraptor, as described in the literature and in Crichton's novel, was a creature no more than five or six feet tall. But because the speedy, ferocious raptors are the story's star villains, the Spielberg team decided to make them half again as large. The choice was scientifically defensible, since so few specimens had been found that generalizations were hard to come by. Anyway, what did books know? Then a surprising thing happened. In Utah, paleontologists found bones of a real raptor, and it was the size of the movie's beast...
...canal running through them varies in size according to the number of nerve fibers it contains, and that in turn depends on how much the muscles controlled by these nerves are used. Giffin is trying to determine whether theropods -- the dinosaurian suborder that includes fierce predators like Oviraptor, Deinonychus, Velociraptor and Tyrannosaurus rex -- could have used their undersize forelimbs for grasping or whether the arms were purely vestigial...
...fell short of full-fledged endothermy. "The problem," notes Michael Brett- Surman of the Smithsonian Institution, "is that there is no such thing as 'the dinosaur.' There were seven groups living 150 million years ago that started out as one thing and perhaps evolved into something else." Although Deinonychus, Velociraptor and other small, meat-eating bipeds may have been warm-blooded, Brett-Surman believes large predators like Tyrannosaurus rex, which went through three vastly different growth stages, may have been equipped with a variable metabolism...