THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, May 25, 1996 TAG: 9605250002
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A15 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Opinion
SOURCE: GEORGE HEBERT
LENGTH: 56 lines
When is the biggest and baddest of all time not the biggest and baddest of all time?
Answer: When something bigger and badder is discovered. At least that's the way it is in the world of the fossil-hunters. And the latter don't even seem to be fazed by the latest such discovery, which involves the reptilian giants that ruled the earth some millions of years ago. The scientists, in fact, moved quickly from astonishment to enumeration of the new insights that the retrieved bones give us about prehistoric biology.
For years, North America's Tyrannosaurus rex has been the outsize champ among the carnivorous dinosaurs, with gaping, stilleto-toothed jaws, meat-chompers like something out of a dragon-filled nightmare. This great prehistoric predator has served as the very symbol of nature at its maximum rawest.
Well, T. rex isn't the hugest horror any more. A team of paleontologists, led by Dr. Paul C. Sereno of the University of Chicago, has unearthed, in Morocco, the fossilized remains of Carcharodontosaurus saharicus, another toothy carnivore from the dinosaur period, a 230-million-year era which ended about 65 million years ago.
The new-found reptile was about 45 feet long, was equipped with 5-inch, sharp-pointed dental weapons and had a skull that measured 5 feet, 4 inches in length - which the researchers think may be larger than the largest known T. rex skull.
More remarkable still, even as the African-site diggers geared up to let the world know about what they had found, yet another, possibly even larger relative, Giganotosaurus carolinni, came to light in Argentina.
And here, aside from any record-setting dimensions, are some of breakthroughs in knowledge that the paleontologists are hailing:
The fossils give a ``new understanding of how dinosaurs came to be divided geographically'' (Dr. Sereno's words) among the various land masses after the breaking up of the great single continent that existed when dinosaurs appeared.
The new information changes ``our rapidly evolving concepts of paleogeography during the Cretaceous,'' according to a Canadian paleontologist. It was in the Cretaceous period that present-day land areas took rough shape and began to slip and slide around.
Yet another expert finds the Sereno-team fossils important because so little was known about dinosaur inhabitants of Africa during the Cretaceous.
Plus other stuff like that.
All very well. But there's another point of significance, I'd say:
The discoveries also prove the high, early intelligence of the little shrew-like mammals that appeared during the dinosaur years - those tiny forebears of the human race.
These diminutive fellows were pretty smart in taking lots and lots of evolutionary time, staving off our arrival until ALL those big guys with the big teeth were long gone. MEMO: Mr. Hebert, a former editor, lives in Norfolk. by CNB