tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11717697.post-1113532542394041982005-04-14T19:24:00.000-07:002005-04-14T19:35:42.396-07:00Remember the scene in Jurassic Park when the characters run from a heard of stampeding Gallimimus? At one point one of the characters asks if this reptile is a “meatasaurus”—a carnivore—but Dr. Grant, played by actor Sam Neill, never really answers his young companion’s query. To my seven-year-old paleontologist in training Noah Wallace Hessinger, this implied that Gallimimus might have been a herbivore, a point he was quick to dispute. Announcing that he wished to discuss the food chain with me recently, Noah said “some people” seem under the impression this 13 to 20 foot dinosaur from the Cretaceous period ate only plants. Instead, Noah insisted the creature is an omnivore, an animal whose diet consists of both plants and animals. A quick consultation of <a href="http://www.zoomwhales.com/subjects/dinosaurs/dinos/Gallimimus.shtml">ZoomDinosaurs.com</a>, a great little dinosaur encyclopedia site, showed he was quite right. The site reveals that Gallimimus probably fed on small animals like insects and lizards, eggs and some plants. When I asked Noah to draw a picture of the creature for our blog, his first rendering (1) more closely resembled <a href="http://dinosauricon.com/genera/ceratosaurus.html">Ceratosaurus</a>, the horned Jurassic predator. However, Noah insisted that unlike Ceratosaurus, his creation had one horn on its snout not two or three. Noah also insisted that paleontologists might have simply failed to find the horn. He’s been obsessed with the possibility of mistakes being made by scientists in estimating what a dinosaur may have looked like in life since hearing the story of how <a href="http://learn.nsdl.org/asknsdl_elem.htm">Iguanodon’s </a>thumb was mistaken for a horn on its nose at first. But after studying a painting by paleo-artist <a href="http://www.prehistory.com/gallimim.htm">Josef Moravec </a>and some fossil remains at the <a href="http://www.toyen.uio.no/palmus/galleri/montre/english/nn008.htm">Paleontological Museum </a>at the University of Oslo, Norway, he had a few more tries. His mother and I most appreciated a version (2) which gave the creature a yellow spine formation. Another (3), Noah informed me, was to depict the similarities between Gallimimus and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/velociraptor">Velociraptor</a>, another birdlike contemporary. One of Noah’s most interesting renderings is a version of the creature with a single feather on its head (4). He’s become fascinated with the theoretical link between <a href="http://www.sdnhm.org/exhibits/feathered/index.html#overview">dinosaurs and birds</a>, particularly the raptors that are depicted as feathered in some renderings.Shawn A. Hessingerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12568930225016607509noreply@blogger.com