New dinosaur finds look like lizards designed by Liberace
By Peter Carlson
Washington Post
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Dinosaurs are like presidential candidates: The more you learn about them, the less impressive they are.
Back when I was a kid and everything I knew about dinosaurs was wrong, they were awe-inspiring creatures, giant behemoths that could eat the entire Sahara Forest for breakfast, then use a cave man as a toothpick while strutting over to Japan to star in a movie about the monster that ate Tokyo.
Nowadays — as National Geographic magazine points out in a wonderful cover story called "Big Bad Bizarre Dinosaurs" — paleontologists are finding creepy, nerdy dinosaurs that look like mutant freaks or Dr. Seuss drawings or lizards designed by Liberace.
These creatures are so bizarre that National Geographic brought in novelist John Updike to make sense of them.
"Before the 19th century, when dinosaur bones turned up, they were taken as evidence of dragons, ogres or giant victims of Noah's Flood," Updike writes. "After two centuries of paleontological harvest, the evidence seems stranger than any fable and continues to get stranger. ... Contemplating the bizarre specimens recently come to light, one cannot but wonder what on earth Nature was thinking of."
To illustrate how these newly discovered dinosaurs might have looked, the Geographic commissioned Pixeldust Studios to create computer-enhanced pictures of the beasts.
And then there's the Parasaurolophus — a huge beast with two long pipe-like bones extending out of its skull. At first scientists theorized that these bones were used as snorkels when the dino swam.
Now, they think the pipes might have been used like a trombone to make noise.
What does Updike make of these strange creatures?
He figures they're no more bizarre than the humans he's chronicled in his 22 novels.
"How weird might a human body look to them?" he writes. "That thin and featherless skin, that dish-flat face, that flaccid erectitude, those feeble, clawless five digits at the end of each limb, that ghastly utter lack of a tail — ugh. Whatever did this creature do to earn its place in the sun, a well-armored, nicely specialized dino might ask."
Dinosaurs dominated the Earth for 200 million years. Humans have been around for barely 200,000.
Updike is not optimistic that we'll ever catch up: "... for all its fine qualities, Homo sapiens is befouling the environment like no fauna before it."
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