What Really Killed the Dinosaurs?
Sixty-five million years ago, an asteroid killed the dinosaurs. Not that the ruling reptiles made it easy—Tyrannosaurus, Triceratops, and company didn’t stand in one place, stoically waiting for the inevitable.
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Get PocketSixty-five million years ago, an asteroid killed the dinosaurs. Not that the ruling reptiles made it easy—Tyrannosaurus, Triceratops, and company didn’t stand in one place, stoically waiting for the inevitable.
Julius Csotonyi spends his days imagining the past, and then turning that into reality.
Jurassic Park may have helped revolutionize modern CG animation in movie-making, but out of the 14 minutes of dinosaurs in the movie, only four were completely generated by computers.
The largest predatory dinosaur to walk this earth wasn’t the T. rex. It was Spinosaurus aegyptiacus, a 50-foot long creature with powerful jaws and a solid, spiny sail on its back that dwelled in Northern Africa 95 million years ago.
Natural history goes to auction five or six times a year in America, and one Sunday last May a big sale took place in Chelsea, at the onetime home of the Dia Center for the Arts.
Three years ago, a family of rural farmers stumbled across an incredible paleontological site on their land in the Patagonia region of Argentina.
A GIANT, pinkish femur juts out of the ground, longer than a person is tall. The area is littered with the fossilised vertebrae, leg and arm bones and skull of this Hadrosaurus. For 70m years it and other dinosaurs have lain buried here.
ONE morning last spring, I opened my email to see a photograph of the paleontologist Diego Pol. There he was, stretched out, feigning sleep, on a dinosaur’s femur roughly the size of a living room couch. A charismatic Argentine scientist who likes to clown, Diego had a spectacular find.
Claws scrabbled at the door, each scratch a shock of fear to my heart. Inside the kitchen, my sister and I hid behind a stainless steel table, slick as the sweat that dripped from my brow.
'You just went and made a new dinosaur?' I am an unabashed Jurassic Park fan.