Chiappe & Sereno on Science Friday

[MKIRKALDY@aol.com]

Science Friday on Talk of the Nation (National Public Radio) at:
http://programs.npr.org/archives/totn/Day.cfm?Date=11/20/98&Program_ID=TOTN&Fi
leName=TOTN112098

has a 40 minute Real Audio tape of an interview on Friday, 11/20 with 
Luis Chiappe and Paul Sereno on the recent dinosaur finds.  The host 
is Ira Flatow.  Some highlights:

Dr. Chiappe said that the fossil sauropod eggs were layered 15 feet deep
over a surface of about a square mile.  There were thousands of eggs, but
70-80 had bones and/or fossil skin, which was lizard-looking with a rosette
pattern or stripes.  He had no idea what color the original skin might have
been, and there was no DNA preserved.  It could not be determined if they
were laid in nests--they did not seem to be distributed in a nest pattern.
Perhaps there were gigantic nests or they were laid in a regular pattern,
but that question was going to be addressed in a dig next March at the
same site in Patagonia.  

Dr. Sereno said of _Suchomimus_ (which he pronounced with a long "i"
in "mimus") that he believed that the crocodile-like features in the find
were due to convergent evolution.  The massive claw would have been
16-18 inches with the sheath.  There were huge muscle attachments on
the forelimbs, which were four feet long.  The team found about 70% of
the skeleton, and the bones which were found represented a fairly even 
distribution over the body.  

Mary
mkirkaldy@aol.com