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The Gazette from Montreal, Quebec, Canada • 110

Publication:
The Gazettei
Location:
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Issue Date:
Page:
110
Extracted Article Text (OCR)

J6 Montreal, Saturday, February 15, 198G Dinosaurs no longer seen as dumb, slow, colorless reptiles 4 were warm-blooded, like birds and mammals. "Recent discoveries of new kinds of dinosaurs and new theories put forward to explain them have resulted in a nearly complete revamping of our image of the dinosaurs," said Peter Dodson, an associate professor of anatomy at the University of Pennsylvania veterinary school and the chief scientific consultant for the exhibit. Dodson noted that 40 per cent of all the dinosaurs known to exist have been found during the past 15 years. "New kinds of dinosaurs are being discovered at the rate of seven a year," he said. Important discoveries have been made recently in China, Mongolia, Canada and the U.S., he noted.

When dinosaurs were first discovered in the 19th century, Bakker said, scientists noticed they were built more like mammals and birds than reptiles. Their bones were lighter in weight than other reptiles of their era, and they appeared to grow quickly, like warm-blooded animals. Some were swift, gaudy and warm, caring parents By the 1920s, however, the bulk of the scientific community became convinced that dinosaurs were slow-moving, stupid creatures related most closely to modern-day reptiles. "The view that dinosaurs were bird-like fell into disrepute," Bakker said. But a series of discoveries in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as the reinterpretation of older fossil finds, has helped swing the pendulum back.

In 1969, John Ostrom, a professor at Yale University, reported that he had found a small meat-eating dinosaur in Montana. From its bone structure, he concluded that it must have been far more active and agile than other dinosaurs. Its behavior, he said, must have been far closer to birds, such as hawks, than to reptiles such as crocodiles. At about the same time, Armand de Ricqles, a bone specialist in Paris, noticed that the internal structure of many dinosaur bones seemed to resemble that of mammals more than lizards. During the next few years, Bakker assembled a broader framework of evidence and published scientific papers that theorized that all dinosaurs were warm-blooded.

While many scientists believe he has overstated the case, and that large dinosaurs must have been cold-blooded, Bakker's strong views sparked a scientific debate that continues today. Some of the most exciting recent discoveries show that at least some of the dinosaurs were altruistic and caring traits not usually associated with reptiles. In 1978, Jack Horner of Montana State University and Robert Makela, a Montana high-school science teacher, discovered a series of nests containing the eggs of duck-billed dinasaurs as well as young dinasaurs that had lived in the nest for several months after hatching. "The evidence we found suggests that the dinosaurs' parents were altruistic in the sense that they cared for and nurtured their young," Horner said. In light of their findings, they called the species Maiasaura, or "good mother lizard." Since then, new interpretations of the bone structure of the Tyrannosaurus has led scientists to believe that this 12-metre-long dinosaur ran at speeds up to 55 kmh on its hind legs with its tail stretched out behind it.

Previously, scientists thought it had lumbered along, dragging its tail on the ground, much as Godzilla does in the movies. "The idea that the Tyrannosaurus plodded along like some slow, dim-witted creature is simply not true," Bakker said. "He was not a shuffler." And Dodson said dinosaurs probably were more intelligent than has been popularly believed. "While they are not as intelligent as the family dog, they were more intelligent than crocodiles and snakes," he said. By JIM DETJEN Knight-Ridder Newspapers PHILADELPHIA The scene, set in central Montana 70 million years ago, is straight out of a rock video: A bright purple Tyrannosaurus rex, king of the dinosaurs, races by at 55 kmh, waving a tail that is pink and yellow.

A duck-billed dinosaur bright yellow struts by snorting, bellowing a cry somewhere between an oboe and a French horn. Welcome to the new, more colorful world of dinosaurs. This view of dinosaur mating season belongs to Robert Bakker, a Colorado scientist, whose provocative ideas have helped shake up the world of paleontology, the study of fossils and prehistoric life, over the past decade. "The dinosaurs' colors probably were seriously gaudy, really punk," Bakker, an adjunct professor of paleontology at the Colorado State Museum, said recently. While nobody knows for sure what dinosaurs looked like or sounded like, new discoveries and reinterpretations of old fossil finds have breathed new life into some old bones.

Many of these new theories are on display at the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Science's new, exhibition, "Discovering Dinosaurs." Academy officials say it is the most ambitious dinosaur exhibit ever presented. "Until the 1960s, the view was that dinosaurs were big, sluggish, creatures with pea-sized brains. They stumbled around in the sludge, waiting to go extinct," Bakker said. we know now that much of that is simply untrue. Dinosaurs weren't failures.

They were extremely successful animals in charge of the land for 135 million years more than twice as long as the mammals have been in control." Under the new theories, dinosaurs are portrayed as smarter, faster, more colorful, more gregarious and more caring toward their young. Although dinosaurs are classified as reptiles, entists say that at least some of the smaller ones iff it Al r.p Reconstruction of Canada's Albertosaurus bares fangs. Mania for icons may be mixed blessing Vietnam begins survey of its 800 bird species sL2T. Bird's Evq Personal computers CHRYS GOYENS View 4 DAVID BIRD Wj( With or without icons, entry to a program is fairly simple in either case. In the latter, the user would have to memorize a small series of DOS commands, and then learn another series of program commands, for the WordStar (which, by the way, are on-screen in directory mode).

Where the desktop environment really pays off is in the use of which manage onscreen movement among a variety of programs, a process usually called multitasking. Microsoft recently introduced a new interface called Windows. It is still very new, so that I have not yet heard of bugs in the program. Windows comes with expanded memory so that it can go beyond the 640K RAM available to an IBM XT user, for example, and better still, handles hard-disk applications with finesse. Major hassle One of the major hassles for those people who have hard disks in their IBMs, or other machines with MS-DOS, is the clumsy nomenclature.

The CD, or the "infamous Cee-Dee backslash" command as it has become known, is the MS-DOS way of telling one to Change Directories in hard disk. You do that because every application you have, word-processing, spreadsheet, is arranged in its own mini-drive or sub-directory. Which is silly in a way, because many people want a hard disk so that they can get at everything with a keystroke or two, instead or pretending to switch disk drives every time they want to use another application. The CD command sounds easy. But when you consider that there are many other MS-DOS commands that use similar letter combinations, a regular slash () pre ceding the letters or after, or even a backslash () preceding the letters, and that any typo will mean no access, you know that Windows will help.

Windows simplifies hard-disk management. Spreadsheet information from a program like Lotus 1-2-3 can be taken from there and transferred to Windows Write, the graphics-based word-processing program. There the Lotus information (for example, a series of sales projections in a five-year plan) is edited and formatted. The same information can also be moved to Windows Paint (a graphics art program like the Macintosh's MacPaint) where a series of graphs is put together. Once this task is finished, graphics and text are merged into an integrated text.

Information from a database program like dBase II can then be copied into the Write program (i.e. a distribution list) and the finished report sent off. The Windows program also features Micrografx In-a-Vi-sion, a CAD (computer-aided design) program which can draw highly technical illustrations that can be transferred to Write and other applications. Microsoft is the first with what they like to call "power windows" but others are just behind and closing fast. GEM, Desq and TopView, to name a few programs, provide the same easy graphics-based menu systems.

They all may work a little differently, but most feature multitasking (the ability to run more than one job at a time) and enhanced file management. Now I normally would give you some prices here but these have varied so much in recent months that I am leery of doing so. All I can say with confidence is that these generally sell for less than $200. How much less will depend on the dealer. Microsoft Windows lists for $145 Canadian.

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but is it worth two or three alphanumeric keystrokes? That is a question I ponder as everybody in micro-computing goes icon-crazy. What began as the Macintosh revolution, using a "mouse" to pinpoint and call up editorial options which were represented by icons pictures of file folders, electronic calculators, painter's palettes and trash cans now has spread to Commodore's Amiga, the Atari 520 ST, IBM and others. Brought out by Microsoft, which revolutionized file entry in PCs with its graphic interface, pictorial operations controls have spawned a raft of new easy-to-use devices such as pull-down menus and popup windows. Another term that has emerged to describe the process is the electronic desktop, and it best describes what happens when a Microsoft or Digital Research graphics interface is deployed. Desktop picture DRI's GEM, or Graphics Environment Manager, comes up on screen immediately when the IBM disk operating system, MS-DOS is booted (turned on).

Instead of a simple prompt, usually A just sitting there waiting for you to show that you have mastered the arcane system commands, a desktop picture emerges. At the top left is a file folder marked DOS, which will take you back into the disk operating system. Below it on a second row, perhaps how an office worker might arrange a series of file folders he or she might attend to in a working day, would be a series of directories. These would include directories for a spreadsheet program, word processing, a data base for storage and others. To gain access to word-processing, one simply manoeuvres the mouse or pointer to the pertinent WP file, presses the button, and the screen then features the various text files stored in word-processing.

A easy procedure, especially for the neophyte, and a reason why Apple was able to market its new Macintosh two years ago as the machine which would revolutionize personal computing. However, in terms of simple access, the graphic-interface gain is not quite that overwhelming. If, for example, we compare entering a word-processing program like WordStar with and without graphics interface, there is little gain. For WordStar loaded in a Macintosh, one would turn on the computer, manoeuvre the mouse to the WS directory file, and click. Another move of the mouse and a second click would open our test file, imaginatively named TESTFILE.

For WordStar loaded in an IBM PC without GEM, one would turn on the computer, type WS at the A prompt (or for drive or for a hard disk), and would gain access to the same directory. Except in hard disk where you would have to enter a sub-directory as well. Instead of cute file folders arranged in neat rows with the file name across the top, one would be greeted by a Table of Contents-style printed directory. A single keystroke (D for document, for non-document file) would call up TESTFILE. The public has less to fear from this owl in the city, because they generally nest in hardwood forests such as beech and maple and are not known to be very aggressive.

According to my sources, it's a great year for Bohemian waxwings. Andrea Drumheller of Hatley counted about 40 in some berry bushes on Feb. 1. It's great being on the Hotline of the Province of Quebec Society for the Protection of Birds! My contact, Anne Tarasoff, tells me of a varied thrush living off a feeder at St. Luc on the Richelieu River.

It's been around since Christmas. Marlene Harris chalked up an unhanded peregrine falcon resting on a ledge on the 22nd floor of a building at 2021 Atwater Ave. Tom and Lucy Byrne of Cote Ste. Catherine sighted a robin eating bush berries on Jan. 18.

Speaking of feeders, some people have all the luck! Patricia Tracton of Cote St. Luc enjoys the presence of male and female cardinals, chickadees, juncos, starlings, mourning doves and purple finches at her backyard feeder. Fred and Helen Trigg of Brossard hosted a flock of 40 snow buntings along with the regular two dozen mourning doves at their feeder around Jan. 25. As for me, I suppose I'm satisfied with the half-dozen chickadees munching on my sunflower seeds, but the cheeky little devils never come when I'm What images run through your head when someone mentions the name Vietnam to you? Probably the same as mine a war-ravaged country whose wildlife has been decimated.

But Charles Luthin, conservation director of the W. W. Brehm Fund and a specialist in storks, ibises and spoonbills, tells of a changing Vietnam in World Birdwatch, a newsletter of the International Council for Bird Preservation. Information on Vietnam's rich avifauna is once again filtering back to western ornithologists. Although faced with enormous environmental problems, the Vietnamese people and their government are highly enthusiastic about tackling and solving them.

Currently, seven ornithologists split into two teams (wetlands and forests) are conducting systematic surveys of the country's 800 bird species. 300 scientists In all, the government is sponsoring some 300 scientists nation-wide to complete an extensive resource inventory. Already, new data on rare or previously unknown species such as pheasants or waterbirds are emerging. For example, seven significant breeding colonies of waterbird species virtually extinct elsewhere in Southeast Asia have been found deep in the mangrove or Melaleuca forests of the southernmost province of Minh Hai. However, the keenness and dedication of the Vietnamese people are not enough.

Fifteen years of virtually no information exchange have left these people with a terrific thirst for knowledge. In short, they lack "all specialized literature and even basic reference materials." Luthin is appealing to concerned individuals to send them general reference books and articles, specialized publications, and even back issues of relevant journals and magazines. Since materials sent directly to Vietnam often never arrive, delivery can be assured by shipping the literature to the W. W. Brehm Fund, Vo-gelpark Walsrode, 3030 Walsrode, West Germany.

Essentially, they are acting as a conduit. Great horned owl Seems like everyone and his dog is seeing owls these days. In Kim Evans' case, she was looking for her dog on Jan. 25 in the Elmwood area of Pointe Claire. For some strange reason (and it's often the case), she felt the phlegmatic stare of a great horned owl.

As she looked up, the "tiger of the woods" launched itself, circled about, and perched again. Residents of that area might well keep their eyes peeled for the big fellow, because this species is now beginning its nesting season, snow or no snow. Great horned owls can be extremely aggressive in the defence of their nests. The combination of their silent flight and those razor-sharp meathooks is deadly. At least two owl-spotters have described barred owls to me.

Just west of former prime minister Pierre Trudeau's house on Pine Perry House observed one in a tree. The cardinal in the next tree dashed off, but surprisingly the squirrels seemed unalarmed. More than one squirrel has ended up in a barred owl's crop. Meet the needs of the labour market In the following fields: Office Automation Techniques Hotel and Restaurant Management Tourism and Travel Fashion Designing Fashion Production Fashion Merchandising All programmes lead to a Diploma In collegia! studies (DEC). Downtown Campus.

2015 Drurnmond St. mnm mfmr Montreal H3G I W7 Zfll-1919 Peel metro station fol A simulation center to each programme Integrated Office Systems Centre specialise' de la mode du Quebec Efficient Student Placement services Recognized for the purpose of MEQ loans and bursaries Register now for September 1986 Sylvia Gill Campus, 145 Cartier Ave n-M Pointe Claire H9S4R9 695-2064 (Office Automation Techniques only) Toll-free calls out of Montreal; 1 -800-361 -741 0 nswii ay, BEE.

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About The Gazette Archive

Pages Available:
2,182,188
Years Available:
1857-2024