The dinosaur heresies. New theories unlocking the mystery of the dinosaurs and their extinction / Выдумки о динозаврах. Новые теории, раскрывающие тайну динозавров и их вымирания

It all started very suddenly, in the spring of 1955. I was reading magazines in my grandfather's house in New Jersey, and I found that magical Life cover story—"Dinosaurs." Fold-out, full-color pictures of heroic creatures. Allosaurus, Brontosaurus, Stegosaurus, Tyrannosaurus rex. I discovered an entire world, far, far away in time, that I could visit, whenever I wanted, via the creative labors
of the paleontologists. And I made up my mind then and there that I would devote my life to the dinosaurs. Since I was in the fourth grade, my parents weren't alarmed at my vow. Surely, they thought, it's just a phase that he'll grow out of. Lots of kids my age got hooked on dinosaurs for a while—it was a childhood disease, like mumps or chicken pox, and if left alone, most kids recovered and then had a lifetime immunity to dinosaurmania. But I was that rare exception, a terminal, chronic case. And my mother was patient enough to take me twice a year over the George Washington Bridge to the American Museum of Natural History in New York, where the best dinosaur show in the world played every day of the week on the fourth floor. My family valued scholarship, even if they couldn't quite understand the reverence I had for the study of fossils. <...>