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Mini-rex calls from journalist's road not taken

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Tom Jackson

tjackson@tampatrib.com

Published: September 20, 2009

In my youth, right up until the moment I became intoxicated by the aroma of ink, the insistent thunder of a printing press and the notion that my eyewitness accounts could flow from my fingertips to the next day's (quaint, huh?) printed page, I was absolutely sure I would spend my adult years as ... as ... a paleontologist.

Yes, I was going to be a dinosaur hunter, having been smitten early on by the adventures of Roy Chapman Andrews, 20th century pioneer inexorably bound to the Mesozoic Era; leader of risky, rickety expeditions into the forbidden, foreboding Gobi Desert; discoverer of Velociraptor and fossilized dinosaur eggs; and roundabout inspiration, right down to the trademark rumpled fedora, for Indiana Jones.

Let the other fellows aspire to become the next Mickey Mantle. I would follow Andrews into the badlands, rifle slung over one shoulder, a pouch full of delicate digging tools 'round my waist, and the remains of some undiscovered prehistoric beast resting in 70-million-year-old limestone, waiting to have my name assigned to it.

Except, as you see, my plans were overtaken by events. Instead, it was Robert Bakker who did the pioneering work of the latter half of the 20th century. And it was Bakker who consulted with Steven Spielberg on his Jurassic Park series. Sigh.

Explosive mini-rex

Even now, the residue of my envy for modern-day dino-hunters cannot limit my fascination for virtually every emerging dino-discovery.

News last week out of eastern China, via Chicago, was no exception. A fossil unearthed near Andrews' old Mongolian stomping grounds has been identified as nothing less than the downscale blueprint of Tyrannosaurus rex, the ultimate land predator of the late Cretaceous - the culminating period of dinosaurs on Earth.

The stamp of approval granted Raptorex kriegsteini by leading American and Chinese paleontologists rocked the scientific community that has long embraced as gospel the notion that T-rex's key features - gigantic head, sprinter's hind legs and comically small forelimbs - were evidence of adaptive evolution: what served the beast grew; what didn't withered.

Raptorex swaddles that scenario in plastic explosives and shoves the plunger. This punk predecessor, emerging some 60 million years before its uber-famous descendant, is mini-rex.

Spotlight on the unknown

Says University of Chicago paleontologist Paul Sereno, who led the research, "We now have leapfrogged in our understanding of how Tyrannosaurus rex and its tyrannosaurid relatives came to be on the strength of one specimen."

Including, possibly, the T-rex line arrived fully formed? And that its adaptations - subsequent generations simply grew larger and more formidable - simply foreshadowed similar developments in humankind as food supplies became more stable and abundant?

Ah, that's crazy talk. You can't roll back a whole theory of evolution based on a single fossil find. How about, on this particular Sunday, we simply appreciate Raptorex for what it is: yet another reminder of how every scientific revelation illuminates the vast nature of our remaining ignorance.

Keyword: The Jax Files, for Tom Jackson's bonus musings.

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