Demons of the Mind:
Robotic Dinosaurs, Fossils, And Jurassic Park
John H. Ostrom And Ken Yellis
Children latch onto dinosaurs early on. They 're big, frightening
and fascinating, but not a real threat because they 're not
around anymore.
—Dr. Angela Milner, Paleontologist,
British Museum (Natural History)
But what if dinosaurs were still around? In Michael
Crichton's 1990 best-selling novel, Jurassic Park, unprin-
cipled entrepreneurs and single-minded scientists use
state-of-the-art genetics to bring the dinosaurs back as—
what else?—the star attractions of a theme park.
Crichton's book and the eagerly awaited Steven
Spielberg film based on it, scheduled for release this
summer, tap into a widely-held fear that science will one
day go too far. Jurassic Park is a high-tech Frankenstein
story for the 19905.
But how really plausible is the science in Jurassic
Park? In a new exhibit at the Peabody Museum of
Natural History, DINOSAUR VISIONS: SCIENCE AND
FICTION IN JURASSIC PARK — A DINAMATION EXHIBI-
TION, robotic dinosaurs provide an unusual opportunity
to explore what is fact—or at least what is based on
fact—and what is fantasy in Jurassic Park. The
Dinamation critters in DINOSAUR VISIONS, several on
view exclusively in this region, will be right next door to
the Museum's Great Hall, where recent discoveries and
decades of careful reconstruction of the fossil record
are presented against a dramatic backdrop of actual fos-
sil skeletons and Rudolph Zallinger's extraordinary
mural, The Age of Reptiles.
One question DINOSAUR VISIONS cannot answer sat-
isfactorily is why we are so fascinated by dinosaurs. One
partial explanation may be that ever since the discovery
of fossil traces of dinosaurs early in the igth century,
despite scientists' painstaking efforts to reconstruct the
world the vanished creatures ruled, many fundamental
questions remain now—and may always be—unan-
swered.
The Unanswered Questions
The most important unanswered question is what
caused the apparently sudden, total disappearance of
the dinosaurs 65 million years ago? This puzzle has long
preoccupied scientists and the general public alike, but
for very different reasons. Nonscientists are held spell-
bound by the possibility that the dinosaurs' demise was
providential, clearing the way for human beings. Few
scientists think in those terms and, in any case, the
chain of causation would have been very, very long. It
was more than 60 million years from the end of the
dinosaurs' reign to the emergence of Homo sapiens.
Nevertheless, the difficulty paleontologists have had
in explaining the demise of these magnificent creatures
to their own satisfaction, let alone to the lay public, rep-
resents a continuing challenge and, perhaps, a rebuke
to science. Whether new fossil finds, new methodolo-
gies, and new theories will someday dispel the mystery
remains to be seen, of course. But even if they do, they
may not succeed in dispelling our enchantment. Pro-
bably nothing could—unless Crichton's nightmare sce-
nario comes to pass.
Dinosaur Visions
But until that scenario materializes—very, very unlikely,
by the way—we will have to make do with a combination
of substitutes and our own imaginations. Dinosaur
skeletons, like those in the Peabody's Great Hall and
other natural history museums, have long fascinated vis-
itors of all ages for this reason—we get to see the shape
of muscle and sinew on those great bones in our minds'
eye, the color and texture of the skin covering them,
and to invent the snorts, grunts, barks, and whistles
these dinosaurs produced.
The Peabody's renowned mural, The Age of Reptiles,
whose vast surface overlooks the entire Great Hall, acti-
vates our ingenuity in a different way, evoking a world
no human will ever see; it has been reproduced count-
less times since the 19408. Rudolph Zallinger is one of
the many artists who have sought to visualize these
extraordinary creatures and their lost world. In fact, the
very first animated film ever made featuring a dinosaur
was Gertie the Dinosaur (1914), and popular culture,
including movies and comic strips, like today's Calvin
and Hobbes, has been filled with them. Do these forms of
artistic expression, scientific and popular, dreadful or
idyllic, reflect our relief that the world of the dinosaurs
can never be recovered—or our disappointment?
The Dinamation Fascination
Perhaps no form of visualization of dinosaurs has so
captivated the popular imagination as the robotic-
dinosaurs of Dinamation International. These anima-
tronic representations of the lost creatures acid a kind
of substance to our fantasies, giving us dinosaurs that
are not only three-dimensional, corporeal, and colorful,
but move and make noise as well. The Dinamation
dinosaurs represent a combination of pneumatic tech-
nology and inspired guesswork. Robotic dinosaurs can,
at this stage anyway, show only a handful of the motions
and behaviors dinosaurs were capable of, but they show
features—skin color and texture, for example—for
Discovery 24 ( i ) 1993
Even if, as in Jurassic Park, Tenontosaurus (shown eating a cycad) and other Kg plant-eaten swallowed .stones lo make their digestive processes more
efficient, Mesozoic vegetation was poor fare, nutritionally speaking, although probably no worse than the Acacia browse, eaten by ekjihant.s in .such huge
amounts. Painting try Eleanor M. Kish. Reproduced with permission of the Canadian Museum of Nature, Ottawa, Canada.
which the fossil record provides no trace and about
which museums have been hesitant to speculate.
Is Dinamation science? The robotic dinosaurs cre-
ated by Dinamation International are an effort to make
the research and theories of scientists come alive. In
this, they are like the work of writers like Crichton and
filmmakers like Spielberg who transform a mixture of
fact and fancy into popular entertainments. Like
Crichton and Spielberg, too, the staff of Dinamation
consult regularly with experts in the field to make their
product as accurate and realistic as the evidence and
technology permit.
But Dinamation is not real science because there is
no way to test the robotic creatures experimentally. The
reconstructed dinosaurs can never be verified by com-
parison with the real thing or the surviving evidence of
them, any more than Crichton's book or Spielberg's
movie can. They can never be falsified, the crucial char-
acteristic of scientific discourse. Scientists may conclude
that these fantasies are more or less plausible, more or
less consistent with the evidence, but there is no way,
finally, to know.
That uncertainty, of course, needn't detract from
our enjoyment, anymore than it would with the movie
or the book. After all, skin must be some color and it
must feel like something. Dinosaurs certainly made some
kind of noise. The sounds emitted by the Dinamation
critters are digital extrapolations of noises modern ani-
mals make; the movements, too, are based on what liv-
ing animals do, mimicking behaviors of creatures
believed to be similar to those portrayed. Peabody visi-
tors will be able to test their own conjectures against
those of the technicians of Dinamation and their sci-
entific advisors. To help them along, we have, in
DINOSAUR VISIONS, surrounded these robotic creatures
with other images drawn from the long and rich history
of our fascination with dinosaurs.
Welcome To The 19905, Dr. Frankenstein
It is that fascination that drives both the book and
movie; Jurassic Park is the name of a high-tech theme
park that goes badly awiy. The entrepreneurs, scientists,
and engineers who build the park cause havoc, much as
Dr. Frankenstein did almost 200 years earlier, by inter-
fering with matters they do not really understood—and
do not know that they do not understand, Michael
Crichton's characters, like the scientist in Mary Shelley's
novel, tamper with the balance of nature itself, unleash-
ing forces they cannot control.
Crichton's target, of course, is what the Greeks
called hubris. The idea that humankind is twice as smart
as it needs to be but only half so wise is an old one in
western culture; Prometheus and Icarus suffered for
usurping the prerogatives of the gods. Do scientists do
dangerous things? Do they, knowingly or otherwise, act
without fully anticipating the consequences? O-f course;
wTe all do. But when scientists clo it especially dreadful
things can happen. Science and technology have come
a long way since the ancient Greeks, but do we really
trust scientists to handle their Cray supercomputers,
gene sequencers, and dinosaur DNA wisely, and pre-
serve us from disaster? Fortunately, in this case we don't
have to; Crichton's genetic scenario is not about to hap-
pen.
Missing Pieces
Nevertheless, scientists will keep looking for fragments
of dinosaur DNA, not to clone them, but to shed
needed light on such vexing questions as to how closely
the creatures were related to birds! These questions are
very old and remain unresolved, though somewhat
clarified, by the ever more sophisticated methods for
analyzing the fossil record, which is itself still emerging.

b e d
Gait and stance. Three tetrapods (four-legged animals) with
different types of stance appear above simplified crass-sections
through their limbs and bodies.
i Lizard: sprawling stance. 2 Crocodile: semi-improved gait
(hurrying with body held above the ground). 3 Horse: fully
improved stance and gait, as in the dinosaurs.
a Body b Thigh c Leg d Foot
Seen from the side, the, Saurischia 's reptile-like pelvic girdle (i)
looks like an A, while that of the Ornithischia (birdlike pelvis)
resembles an H lying on its side (2). Bone joint surfaces and mus-
cle scars preserved on bones show that, like birds and mammals,
dinosaurs stood with their legs held in a vertical position below
their hips and shoulders; the legs of lizards, crocodiles, and turtles
extend from the sides of their bodies, with their bellies nearly touch-
ing the ground.
Diagrams from The Dinosaur Data Book by David Lambert
and the Diagram Group. Courtesy of Diagram Visual Information,
Limited and Avon Books.
The word dinosaur means terrible lizard, coined by
the great igth-century English anatomist and zoologist,
Richard Owen, who was the first to study them systemat-
ically. Owen used the term Dinosauria to refer to a previ-
ously unrecognized group of extinct vertebrates that
resembled modern reptiles in almost every important
respect but were by and large much bigger. While scien-
tists have long been aware that important differences
exist between dinosaurs and living reptiles, anatomically
most dinosaurs were more like reptiles than like any
other animal.
For example, in both dinosaurs and reptiles the jaw
is composed of several bones, but in mammals is all of
one piece. Dinosaurs also have single ear bones, uni-
formly shaped teeth (rather than different kinds for dif-
ferent functions), and fenestrae, or holes, behind the
eye sockets—hallmarks of many kinds of reptiles, as
well. Other similarities between dinosaurs and reptiles
include configurations of the jaw joint, placement of
the ribs (a reptile has ribs along the neck and body,
from head to pelvis, whereas a mammal usually has ribs
only along the shoulder and chest), and absence of epi-
physes, bones that, after ossifying separately, fuse into a
single structure, as does the human thighbone.
In other respects, however, the pelvic design of
some dinosaurs, for instance, was more avian than rep-
tilian. The contrast between the pelvises is so sharp that
it serves as the demarcation between the two
dinosaurian orders: Saurischia meaning reptile pelvis,
and Ornithischia, for bird pelvis. These terms, adopted
in the i88os, tell us that scientists have been aware for
at least too years that, at least anatomically speaking,
the term dinosaur included two kinds of animals, one of
which resembled modern land reptiles and another that
was more birdlike.
In a way, that we are aware of the existence of the
dinosaurs at all is remarkable, due entirely to the legacy
of bones and footprints they left behind, virtually the
only part of their otherwise ghostly lives that touches
ours. But while the fossil record is very good for answer-
ing some kinds of questions, it only gives us room to
speculate about many others. The fact that these crea-
tures no longer exist places special demands on a scien-
tist. If dinosaurs were alive today, we could observe their
behavior, record their body temperature, measure their
food and water intake, and analyze their waste products;
most of what puzzles paleontologists could be settled in
short order. Instead, the debates go on, partly because
dinosaurs, on the evidence we have, are hard to know,
partly because, as a group, they seem to have been truly
complex creatures. When the dinosaurs died out, they
took many of their secrets with them, leaving fragments
of bone like erector-set pieces waiting to be reassembled
and puzzled over.
So Big
These reconstructed skeletons of dinosaurs are like
blueprints, outlines of size, shape, and posture. Most
impressive is their size, which sharply differentiates
them from all other creatures. More than half the
known dinosaurs were as large as, or larger than, the
largest living terrestrial mammals, including the African
elephant, the white rhinoceros, and the hippopotamus.
Given the metabolic costs that even cold-blooded
dinosaurs would have had to pay to survive, one must
wonder why so many of them grew so large in the first
place. This enormity of scale was clearly no fluke; they
held dominion over the animal kingdom for almost 150
million years and their size obviously must not have
been a handicap, as was once widely believed. But what
advantage did giantism confer?
One clue can be provided by present-day crocodiles.
If two crocodiles of different weights bask in direct sun-
light, the body temperature of the larger one will
increase at a slower rate. Conversely, if the same animals
crawl into shade, the smaller one will cool down more
rapidly. This is because the ratio of skin area to body
mass decreases as a creature grows larger, resulting in
proportionately less surface area through which heat
can escape. In effect, a large body acts as a thermal
reservoir when the environment cools and an insulator
when it heats up.
But if sheer size were always an advantage, why
aren't there land animals now as big as the larger
dinosaurs? One reason may be the amount of food large
animals need to survive. In general, the larger the ani-
mal, the more it eats. An African elephant, weighing in
at about six tons, can spend 15 hours a day finding,
picking, and eating its daily food requirement, about
300 pounds of leaves and limbs. To eat this much, it
needs a huge head—equivalent to about 15% of its
body weight, nearly a ton!—and large grinding molars.
During the history of life, creatures on both land
and sea have evolved into large forms several times.
Ancient fishes, amphibians, reptiles, even insects have
grown very, very large. Largeness is, in evolutionary
terms, a sign of success, that is, of creatures finding
their environment highly congenial. But what is very
successful in one set of conditions can be extremely
costly if those conditions change.
The Bengal monitor, a diurnal lizard of southern Asia, spends most of
its lime mntinnlf,ss, either basking in the sun to get warm enough for a
brief, frenetic bout of hunting, or hiding in the shade to prevent over-
heating. During cold weather it is dormant. Courtesy of Department
Lilmiry Services, American Museum of Natural History.
Jurassic Junk Food
The size of the dinosaurs is puzzling from another per-
spective. From the shape and arrangment of teeth, and
the form of the hand and foot, it appears that most
dinosaurs ate plants. But the Earth today is not the same
as the Earth 150 million years ago; so plant-eating
dinosaurs during most of the Mesozoic had a very differ-
ent diet from modern herbivores, bereft of angiosperms,
or flowering plants, including all grasses, vegetables,
fruits, grains, nuts, and tubers. In other words, virtually
none of the high-nourishment plant foods that support
today's terrestrial fauna, either directly, through the
animals' browsing or grazing, or indirectly, through
their predation or scavenging, appeared until all but a
handful of dinosaurs had died out. The low-calorie, low-
protein gymnosperms—pine and fir trees, ginkgos,
cycads (similar to palm trees), and cycadeoids (now
extinct)—the dinosaurs ate were far less nourishing
than the variety of herbage available since the Late
Cretaceous.
Indeed, on the available evidence it's difficult to see
howjurassic plant life could have supported the enor-
mous range of gigantic herbivorous fauna that lived
then, even if they were less demanding, low-metabolic
coldbloods, let alone if, as some believe, they were
warm-blooded. So poor was the nutritive value of what
dinosaurs had to dine upon that even if they ate 24
hours a day survival should have been a struggle, how-
ever efficiently they digested their food.
Above. Warm-blooded limber wolves
can go without rest for more than 24
hours while searching for and track-
ing prey. Photograph by RolfO.
Peterson.
Arctic terns, (screened image, these
pages), also endothennic, migrating
between the Arctic and thf Antarctic,
ma\ fl^ more than 20,000 miles a
year. Courtesf of Department of
Library Sen/ices, Am,erican Museum
of Natural History.
Questions Paleontologists Butt Heads Over
Whether the dinosaurs were warm- or cold-blooded is, as
it now stands, one, of the secrets that died with them.
Many people have come to accept the idea of warm-
blooded dinosaur's, but paleontologists are still waging
war on the matter. How dinosaurs regulated their body
temperatures lies at the heart of the contemporary
debate about them because that is the most significant
indicator of any creature's lifestyle.
Actually, the terms warm-blooded and cold-blooded are
somewhat misleading; the difference might better be
compared to that between a house with solar panels and
one with a furnace. Modern reptiles and amphibians are
called cold-blooded because they are ectothcrmic, that is,
their body temperatures rise and fall with/the tempera-
fure of the environment; they have no internal mecha-
nism for staying warm. Warm-blooded, or errdotherrrric,
animals, such as birds and mammals, in contrast, derive
their warmth from metabolic processes—primarily the
oxidation of glucose: their digestive systems break food
down into sugar, which their organs and muscles burn.
This single characteristic shapes much of the rest of
an animal's existence. Cold-blooded animals, ectotherms,
are completely dependent on their surroundings—on
the sun, the air, warm rock surfaces—to elevate their
body temperatures to levels sufficient for foraging, hunt-
ing, and reproduction. Reptiles are torpid and sluggish
most of die time.
In contrast warm-blooded creatures, endotherms,
carry their own sources of heat and their own cooling
systems and enjoy a tremendous range of movement; they
are active day arid night and successfully inhabit all man-
ner of climates. Indeed, mammals and birds have a capac-
ity for prolonged exertion that is lacking in reptiles. At
the other extreme, when the environment grows too
warm for an endotherm, cooling processes such as sweat-
ing and panting take over, dispersing excess heat through
evaporation until the body's temperature is brought back
to normal. Ectothermic creatures in the same circum-
stances have to find water or shade. In the house analogy,

Left. Predator/Prey Ratios.*
One lion (an endotherm) consumes
on average about the same as 10
crocodd s {ectotherms} i.e., ten times
Thus, t
vffl.5 need to have prey thai
are ten times more numerous than
those needed by ectothermif preda-
tors.
Some scientists have concluded
from the ratio of predator to prey
bones at one site that Tyranno
saurus rex was warm-blooded, but
others doubt that the fossil record is
an accurate census. Courtesy of
Diagram Visual Information
Limited and Avon Books.
The so-called haversian canals in the fossilized bones of dinosaurs look
like Ike rliimnels ffiat carry mineral nutrients to and from living bone,
tissue i/t inarm-blooded animals (birds and mammals}, but can also be
found in large ectotherms, such as crocodiles and sea turtles. Photograph
by John It. Ostrom.
the difference is between air-conditioning, on the one
hand, and shades and awnings, on the other.
Endotherms have tremendous advantages over
ectotherms, but they pay a high price for them. The
amount of food —that is, fuel —needed to stoke their
ever-hungry- internal furnaces is tremendous— 30 to 50
times higher than that required by ectotherms of com-
parable size. Consequently, the respiratory, cardiovascu-
lar, and digestive systems of warmblooded creatures are
larger, more complex, and much more energetic than
those of ectothcijias.
The dinosaur ectothermy-endothermy puzzle would
be easily solved if we could but see the creatures, but we
can't. We must build our science on the indirect evi-
dence provided by bones, and the bones are not elo-
quent on this issue. If dinosaurs were warm-blooded,
the evidence should show that their metabolism and
other physiological characteristics were consistent with : •
appetites of monstrous proportions arid that they were
capable of extracting enough food from their environ-
ments to satisfy those appetites. But the metabolic and
physiological indications are ambiguous.
Then too, if plant-eating dinosaurs like the bron«>
tosaur (Apatosaurus) , which weighed 25 to 30 tons (four
or five times as much as an African elephant), were
warm-blooded ttj|y would have had to consume at least
2000 pounds of fodder a day. But how would that have
been possible, considering that their heads were so
small compared to their body size —about the size of a
modern horse's head, but with a body 50 times larger
than a horse's? Even their teeth were poorly adapted for
grinding. It's as if we were to try to get all our nourish-
ment by eating popcorn through a straw.
Fighting Over Scraps
What has become clear in the last few years is that these
ancient animals were more complex and heterogeneous
than either the traditional view or more recent theories
might suggest. While there is reason to believe that at
i^y^^p**
least a few of the smaller dinosaurs probably were warm-
blooded, a cold-blooded metabolism still best fits what
we know about the large dinosaurs. The endotherm-
ectotherm question is hard to answer for the same rea-
son so many questions about dinosaurs can't yet be
answered: the evidence we can derive from fossils is nec-
essarily incomplete, ambiguous, and subject to conflict-
ing interpretations, and it's the only real evidence we
have. As a result, the conclusions reached by different
scientists looking at the same data can vary enormously,
depending on their points of view.
There are many examples of such controversial
readings of the same scraps of data. For example, it has
been argued that the respiratory systems of dinosaurs
most closely resembled those of modern-day birds,
which are much more efficient than those of reptiles or
even mammals, but the tissue that would show that has
not survived fossilization. Similarly, if the large dinosaurs
were warm-blooded, a large multichambered heart
would be necessary in order to generate the tremen-
dous blood pressure needed to pump blood to their
very distant heads, perhaps, in some cases, such as the
very tall Brachiosaurus, even multiple hearts. But the
mere fact of a great vertical distance between a thoracic
position of the heart and the possible level of an ele-
vated brain indicates Brachiosaurus and other enormous
dinosaurs must have had at least two ventricular cham-
bers in order to generate both high and low blood pres-
sures even if their blood was cold.
In fact, for many scientists, sheer size alone is
sufficient to explain many of the features found in the
dinosaur skeletons that have led others to suspect inter-
nal temperature-regulation. Throughout most of the
Mesozoic period warm-bloodedness would have pro-
vided no advantage to large creatures to make up for
the enormous additional energy cost it imposes; the
world was not only warmer than it is now, but the cli-
mate was less variable as well. A large cold-blooded
dinosaur could have maintained a relatively stable body
temperature, and thus remained active, with little
difficulty, by dint of sheer volume alone—what scientists
call mass homeothermia, the tendency of large bodies
to retain warmth longer. Indeed, giantism would have
given them a considerable evolutionary edge: they
would have been able to live like moderately aggressive
endotherms on the comparatively Spartan nutritional
regime of ectotherms.
On the other hand, the smaller dinosaurs may well
have been warm-blooded for some of the same reasons
that the larger ones were likely cold-blooded: the
smaller the creature the more rapidly its stored warmth
dissipates. Archaeopteryx, the suspected link between the
first birds and the coelurosaurs, of which more below,
can perhaps shed some light oil this question. Cold-
blooded animals, because they are dependent on exter-
nal sources of heat, have no insulation, no fur or
feathers to serve as a thermal barrier; nothing prevents
the entry of external heat or the escape of body warmth.
The feather impressions Archaetrpteryx left in its lime-
stone tomb are an irrefutable indication of endothermy,
whatever else feathers may have imposed or permitted.
Thus, at the very least, some small carnivorous
theropods, the coelurosaurs to which Archaeopteryxvi-nt,
so closely related, probably were warm-blooded.
The Multifarious World Of The Dinosaurs
Actually, for many people, the idea of small dinosaurs
takes some getting used to—dinosaur is all but synony-
mous with humongous—but the smallest adult dinosaur
specimen, Compsognathus, is estimated to have weighed
less than four pounds. Although it was larger than 70
percent of the mammal kinds alive today, Compsognathus
was certainly small by dinosaur standards. It was proba-
bly an opportunistic predator; we may never know
whether they, like the procompsognathids in Jurassic
Park, anesthetized their sick, injured, young, or weak-
ened victims to overcome their resistance.
The dining options for scavengers or other carni-
vores during much of the Mesozoic Era were quite var-
ied. Not only were there more than 300 genera of
dinosaurs, many of them docile herbivores that left
behind large fleshy carcasses when they died, but many
other terrestrial animals, including insects, mammals,
and, latterly, too, the first birds. Many dinosaurs did live
contemporaneously, although others had become
extinct long before many varieties would appear.
According to the geological record, the dinosaurs
inhabited the Earth through nearly all of the Mesozoic,
appearing about 215 million years ago, during the
Triassic Period, and disappearing some 150 million
years later at the end of the Cretaceous. During that
period the Earth with its rich atmosphere and narrow
range of temperatures saw a profusion of life. The
planet underwent significant geological, environmental
and climatic changes too, and many of these species
would vanish during the mass extinctions of 65 million
years ago; others survived and adapted.
Our Friends The Dinosaurs We don't know the outcome of that particular
Which brings us back to where we startedr/«r«j.H< Park episode, but the image conjured up by mere footprints
derives its suspense from the idea that humans and is vivid, touching, terrible, familiar. Variants of this
dinosaurs coulcl not peacefully coexist. Certainly most drama—the relentless necessity of food, the ceaseless
popular treatments of dinosaurs focus on their fear- search for safety—are acted out countless times around
someness; as competitors for food and space on this world, on the land, in the air, under the surface of
planet, they would present a tough challenge for the oceans. It is life at work, at once awesome and mun-
smaller, weaker Homo sapiens, even if we really are as dane. And, as Crichton reminds us in Jurassic Park, what-
smart as we think we are. But is another scenario ever happens to humankind, life will go on.
possible, a Peaceable Kingdom containing dinosaurs as In that sense, too, our friends the dinosaurs arc still ,»'
well as us? Is it even possible we have been sharing the with us. Their mystery activates our curiosity about what
good earth with the dinosaurs all along? came before us, our anxiety about what will come after,
The first-found fossil of Archaeopteryx, a primitive our insatiable need to Know, our intense frustration in •;•
creature whose wishbone and feathers led scientists to the face of the unknown. Fossil footprints tell their tales
designate it the oldest known bird, was discovered in about dinosaur gait (even the largest were fairfy active.)
1861; six others have been found since. For most of this and social behavior (some dinosaurs liver! in groups
century it was thought that Archaeopertyx had a common the bones tell us about size, posture, anatomy. The
reptile ancestor with both dinosaur orders, Saurischia dinosaurs, neither physiologically simple nor taxonofni-
and Ornithischia. But over the past twenty years the cally uniform, nearly like mammals in their variety, |
seven Archaeopteryx skeletons have undergone careful
reexamination by John H. Ostrom, coauthor of this
ranging from colossal cold-blooded hulks to fleet-footed
high-octane hunters that gave vertebrates the secret of ::
avian flight, continue to teach us through oui fascma*
II
essay. Professor Ostrom concluded that the creature's
anatomy—its teeth (modern birds have none), shoul- tion about the inexhaustible creativity of nature. And, f
ders, forelimbs, pelvis, feet, and tail—were much more by the limits of what we know for sure, thev teach us the
dinosaurlike than birdlike. So similar was Archaeopteryx no less important lesson of humility.
to the smaller coelurosaurs (carnivorous bipeds that
looked like miniature tyrannosaurs and were, appar-
ently, no less ferocious) that the entire avian order
might be descended from these small dinosaurs.
If Ostrom is correct, far from the dinosaurs having
disappeared, we are surrounded by their winged
descendants! If fossil dinosaur DNA is ever recovered,
we will learn whether Ostrom's intuition is on target. If
it is, perhaps some of our unanswered questions about
how the various kinds of dinosaurs lived—how they
reproduced, whether they mated for life, how they
cared for their young, whether they were social, what
kinds of groups they travelled in—and dinosaur biol-
ogy—dinosaur skin color and texture, vision, hearing,
sense of smell—can be approached through study of
birds.
'
Meanwhile, the fossil record still has important sto-
ries to tell. In what is now Texas the footprints of a herd
of Apalosaurus travelling along a river were preserved.
They appear to have arranged themselves, according to John H. Ostrom is Professor of (Geology and Geophysics, Ynle
the tracks, with the giant adults, both male and female, L'nwersih, find Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology, Peabod}-
on the outside, creating a protective barrier around the Museum of.Natural History, and Cumlor-in-CJnirgc, DIXOSAI K
calves. Beyond the perimeter, an Allosaurus, a ferocious VISIONS: SCIENCE AND FICTION IN JURASSIC PARK—A
carnivore, shadowed the migrating herd, waiting for the DINAMATION EXHIBITION. Ken Yellis is Assistant Director Jen
opportunity to strike some vulnerable prey, a sick, Public Programs, Peabody Museum, and Coardinnlar o
injured, or young Apatosaur momentarily separated VISIONS.
from the band.