MUSEUMS

The Revolution Begins

A radical ring of scientists ditch all those dusty ideas about dinosaur evolution

By Corey S. Powell

Dinosaurs: ancient fossils, new discoveries

American Museum of Natural History, New York City

Through January 8, 2006

Sixty feet long, the steel-frame Apatosaurus seems to have stepped straight out of a gigantic video game. Clearly, this is a beast of a different breed. For one thing, the skeletal re-creation is chrome painted. For another, the head is positioned close to the ground, overthrowing old notions of how the animal would have carried itself. Apatosaurus (the dinosaur formerly known as Brontosaurus) is often depicted as a kind of Mesozoic giraffe, stretching an absurdly long neck to nibble at leafy treetops. Scientists mistakenly inferred this posture from fossils in which the head was twisted back in death by shrunken ligaments. Software simulations by computer scientist Kent Stevens of the University of Oregon, however, suggest the dinosaur held its neck out in front of its body; perhaps it fed on shoreline plants while keeping its legs planted on higher ground.

The sleek model is one shining example of what the new exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History demonstrates so well: Dinosaur science is in the midst of an extreme makeover. Until recently paleontologists relied mainly on a jigsaw-puzzle approach—fitting bones together, picturing some tacked-on flesh, and making educated guesses about how the creature looked and acted when it was alive. These days, researchers are just as likely to be running computer simulations, scrutinizing fossils under a microscope, or carefully analyzing the ways in which modern animals compete for food and sex. These eclectic approaches are overturning entrenched ideas about some of the most famous and best-studied creatures in Earth’s history, giving the lost world a whole new look.

Take the lifelike, one-seventh-scale walking Tyrannosaurus rex designed by animatronics expert Hall Train. The skeleton nimbly flexes its toes, swishes its tail, and sways its hips, daintily confounding those Jurassic Park scenes that show a villainous monster stomping along as fast as a speeding SUV. The replica reflects the research of biologist John Hutchinson of the Royal Veterinary College at the University of London, who, using motion analysis of living animals, concluded that the muscle-bound beast could barely keep up with a sprinting human and may have been as much a scavenger as a fleet-footed hunter. Either way, it ate well: An adjacent panel describes microscopic growth patterns preserved in fossil bone, which indicate that a juvenile T. rex could gain up to five pounds a day.

Even the modern theory that the dinosaurs were exterminated by an asteroid impact gets a skeptical airing. Censuses of marine animals that died out at the same time, conducted by paleontologist Gerta Keller of Princeton University, suggest that the extinction was an extended process rather than a single event. Video screens illustrate the rampant volcanism and abrupt sea-level changes that may have contributed to the mass extinction, and display cases document the scattered nature of the die-off. Many reptiles survived, while many mammals did not.

Nowhere is the exhibit’s sense of novel scientific discovery more intense than in the Liaoning Forest, a 700-square-foot diorama depicting recent fossil finds from Liaoning Province in northeastern China. These remains have not just rewritten existing dinosaur scholarship; they have contributed entire new chapters. Artists at the museum have brought these revelations to life by crafting a meticulous re-creation of an Early Cretaceous forest, complete with a rippling pond, scattered ginkgo leaves, and the sound of chirping cicadas. In fact, every spot in the scene is a recent research finding sprung to life. A drab-feathered Microraptor glides from tree to tree, its plumage evidence of the close evolutionary relationship between birds and dinosaurs. Mei long, a goose-size dinosaur with a broad, flattened tail, slumbers against the edge of a log; this sleeping pose, eerily resembling that of modern birds, offers another hint of kinship. An adult Psittacosaurus guards a brood of her young from the largest known mammal of the time: a badger-size, toothy Repenomamus with the remains of a dinosaur meal in its stomach. All the anatomy on display is realistic; more surprising, so is the action. Volcanic eruptions in the region apparently buried animals alive, preserving aspects of dinosaur behavior that have never before been seen.

Unlike the rest of the exhibit, the Liaoning Forest features no interactive touch screens, no talking heads, and no chrome-colored models, yet it is the place where visitors seem to linger the longest. The attraction here is a matter of pure giddy wonder. In a hall full of refutations and reinterpretations, this room is a simple tunnel through time. It lets onlookers reach out across 130 million years to a past that, astonishingly, seems almost within our grasp.

BOOKS

Creased Beast Feast

encyclopedia prehistorica: Dinosaurs

Robert Sabuda and Matthew Reinhart Candlewick Press, $26.99

Beware of this book. You may be seized by a strange urge to snap it open and scare an unsuspecting bystander. Encyclopedia Prehistorica is a collection of the most lifelike pop-up dinosaurs ever to pound the pages of a book. Tyrannosaurus rex seems to charge out, its terrible jaws agape; the long-necked plant-eating Brachiosaurus (above), which weighed as much as nine adult elephants, stands amid a buffet of pine trees; and Archaeopteryx, a pigeon-size fossil with the skeleton of a dinosaur and the feathers of a bird, appears ready to fly off into the sky. Replete with more than 35 intricately crafted creatures, the book is also up to date on dinosaur biology: Modern birds, it notes, share many similarities with theropod dinosaurs, including clawed feet and slender necks. As the authors ask, “Could T. rex’s closest living relative actually be a chicken?”

—Josie Glausiusz

BOOKS

The End of Melancholy

Against depression

Peter D. Kramer

Viking, $25.95

When psychiatrist Peter Kramer traveled the country to promote his 1993 best seller Listening to Prozac, people he met on the book tour would often ask, “What if Prozac had been available in van Gogh’s time?” The underlying assumption—that depression can confer heightened creativity and is therefore worth preserving—struck him as strange. “Do we have qualms about treating or preventing depression?” he asks. If so, why? Is it because it has a romantic allure?

In his new, contemplative book, Kramer argues that depression is often wrongly associated with a “heroic artistic stance, one we think humankind might be worse off without.” In reality, it is a debilitating illness with long-term physical consequences. Neurons are injured, the brain’s hippocampus shrinks, and the risk of heart disease increases. Moreover, depression’s supposed fringe benefit—creativity—may be illusory. While any illness may endow an artist with a unique vision, Kramer contends, depression often manifests itself as a complete lack of passion. Vincent van Gogh himself probably suffered from something more complex than a mood disorder. Could we have justified denying treatment if he had had epilepsy or schizophrenia? Likewise, Paul Gauguin and Friedrich Nietzsche seem to have produced their greatest work while they suffered from syphilis, which can affect the mind. If penicillin had been available, Kramer asks, would we have withheld it to preserve their genius?

The disease of depression can stunt achievement, destroy families, and end in suicide. “How extraordinary it is,” concludes Kramer, “to imagine a society relieved, not of all suffering, but of that particularly excruciating sort.”

—Susan Kruglinski

WE ALSO LIKE . . .

THE END OF THE CERTAIN WORLD: The Life and Science of Max Born

Nancy Thorndike Greenspan

Basic Books, $26.95

In this first biography of Max Born—the quantum physicist who turned the electron from particle to mathematical smudge—Greenspan follows the Nobelist as he navigates human uncertainty. Born taught in Berlin during the First World War and, while a refugee, was a pacifist mentor to the atomic bomb’s creators in the second. As he wrote to his son soon after Hiroshima, “What have they done to my beautiful science?”

—Richard Panek

see also The Born-Einstein Letters 1916–1955: Friendship, Politics and Physics in Uncertain Times (Palgrave/Macmillan, $26.95), which documents the physicists’ decades-long debates.

BOOKS

Women Worker Bees of the World, Compute

When Computers were Human

David Alan Grier

Princeton University Press, $35

Prior to the advent of programmable data-processing electronic devices in the mid-20th century, the word computer was commonly used to describe a person hired to crank out stupefyingly tedious calculations. Most computers were women, their efforts at one time counted in units of “kilogirls.” They calculated the trajectories of mortar shells, patterns in the weather, and even the explosion of the atomic bomb. Human computers have since been largely forgotten, and David Alan Grier, a computer scientist and historian at George Washington University, is intent on restoring them to their rightful place in history. Grier has an academic’s taste for telling everything he knows, but he writes clearly and is obviously in love with these unsung, persistent workers.

The first computers were arguably three French scientists who, in 1757, examined the historical orbits of Halley’s comet; incorporated the gravitational tugs of the sun, Saturn, and Jupiter; and calculated its return to within two months. The process took four months; the comet returned in the spring of 1758, two days before their earliest postulated date. Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, research scientists jobbed out long, complex calculations, first to individuals and then to groups of computers set up in offices. Workers divided their labor, splitting their computations into stages—addition, subtraction, multiplication—then assembling and checking their results. They calculated by hand and later with increasingly sophisticated calculating machines. Universities set up offices full of computers, as did the government, most notably for the post-Depression Work Projects Administration, or WPA. One of the administration’s task forces, called the Mathematical Tables Project, worked on radar, navigation, and explosion problems during the course of World War II.

It was the Mathematical Tables Project that in the late 1940s calculated a classic economics problem for mathematician John von Neumann of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He wanted to double-check the performance of a new electronic calculating machine called ENIAC, or electronic numerical integrator and computer. The human computers, 25 of them, took 21 days; ENIAC could do it in nine hours. Computer hasn’t meant the same thing since. Indeed, with the aid of ENIAC’s successor, a UNIVAC, astronomers recalculated the 1986 return of Halley’s comet, this time with an error of five hours and two minutes. Grier suspects the next time around, the error will be down to seconds.

—Ann Finkbeiner

GIZMOS

Fresh From Air, Pure as a Burbling Brook

Air2water

www.air2water.net

Tap water contains chlorine. Well water can harbor nasty bugs. Just one major source of water remains relatively pristine in this impure world: the nimbus of humidity surrounding the planet. But when you’re

thirsty, where’s the tap? Now, for $800, it can be anywhere you can snake a power line. In June a Beverly Hills company called Air2Water began shipping the Dolphin 2, a countertop machine that makes pure, drinkable water out of ambient water vapor. “It seems like magic, but it’s quite simple,” says CEO Mike Klein.

The Dolphin 2 (above) sucks air through an electrostatic filter—which excludes dust—and funnels it onto cold, Teflon-coated coils. The water that condenses onto the coils drips into a tank and then through carbon filters and sterilizing ultraviolet lights into a stainless-steel chamber, ready for dispensing. “Every six hours, the collected water recirculates for two hours, so it never gets stale,” says Klein. Sure enough, my cupful tasted crisp and fresh. Klein’s data suggest that in hot, humid cities (say, Miami) the machine can make water for about 3¢ to 4¢ a gallon, while in drier Phoenix the cost might be about 20¢ to 50¢ per gallon—far less than the price of bottled water, which typically costs between $1.70 and $4 a gallon.

Klein has big plans for the technology, including solar-powered units for third-world villages and versions that would be incorporated into refrigerators. “You are already making cold for the refrigerator anyway,” he says. “So why not use that energy to also make drinkable water?”

—Brad Lemley

MOVIES

Sex, Birth, and Death on Ice

March of the penguins

A film by Luc Jacquet

Warner Independent Pictures

 Stranded in the Antarctic, a huddle of hardy, ice-dusted creatures fight blizzards, 150-mile-an-hour winds, and temperatures that sink below –70 degrees Fahrenheit. And that’s just the crew filming March of the Penguins, an extraordinary piece of moviemaking that captures a colony of emperor penguins as they pair off and raise their young. Director Luc Jacquet and his team spent 13 frigid months tracking the penguins, first as they skid and slide 124 miles through the snow from the sea to their breeding ground at Oamok, then as they endure dark months of privation and starvation in their quest to produce a viable chick. Each step of this painstaking process—weeks of mating rituals, the delicate passing of the egg from female to male, the hatching and feeding of their gangly offspring, and the chicks’ frantic attempts to escape predation by hungry petrels—is documented in mesmerizing detail. When the famished mothers return to the ocean to feast, down goes a diver with a handheld camera to film the drama. When the 5-month-old chicks follow, so too does the crew. Like the birds’ unparalleled battle to breed, March of the Penguins is a labor of love.

—Anne Casselman

BOOKS

Magical Nostrums on the Nile

Medicine in the days of the pharaohs

Bruno Halioua and Bernard Ziskind

The Belknap Press, $24.95

Fit and slender forms adorn the walls of ancient Egyptian tombs, the images a type of magic designed to assist the newly dead into being reborn whole and perfect in the next world. Only in rare cases did the artists portray tomb owners with all their physical flaws. The Glyptotek Museum in Copenhagen, for example, possesses an unusual piece of ancient Egyptian funerary art (right): a 3,500-year-old carved stone tablet depicting a man with a withered leg and a deformed foot, a probable case of poliomyelitis.

 In everyday life, however, Egyptian physicians had a remarkably advanced view of human frailty, as evidenced by their detailed accounts of the diseases they treated. In a book brimming with curious tidbits, dermatologist Bruno Halioua and cardiologist Bernard Ziskind depict Egyptian healers as medical pioneers who devised a “coherent and largely codified body of practice” some 2,500 years before the Greek physician Hippocrates is said to have laid the foundations of modern medicine. Indeed, Hippocrates and his students probably borrowed at least some ideas from Egyptian medics. Both groups, for example, believed that human sperm originated somewhere near the spine, and both had methods for predicting whether a newborn baby would survive.

Still, such crude science was tempered by an ample dose of imagination. Some Egyptian physicians blithely advocated roasted mice as a cure-all, encouraging young mothers to feed the cooked rodent to their teething infants. Others mixed animal dung into their salves and ointments, even slathering a thick excrement paste upon first-degree burns. “What could be more surprising considering the risk of infection?” the authors ask. Much more intriguing, however, are the little-known successes of Egyptian medicine. Physicians of the era recognized the symptoms of arterial aneurysms and seemingly understood the role of the liver in the circulation of blood. They carefully  described the conditions that resulted from the dislocation and compression of the spinal cord—urinary incontinence, abdominal distension, and quadriplegia. Egyptian healers also sutured large open wounds with thread made from animal guts and repositioned dislocated jaws using a technique still favored today.

With such expertise, Egyptian doctors were sought out by rulers of other ancient lands. They may have even inspired our modern pharmacopoeia—at least linguistically. As one Egyptologist suggests, the ancient Greek word pharmakon actually derives from a much older Egyptian term meaning “he who brings security.”

—Heather Pringle

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6. THE GRAIL BIRD: Hot on the Trail of the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker

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7. THE ROAD TO REALITY: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe

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Source: Barnes & Noble Booksellers