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It's hard to turn around these days without bumping into a dinosaur. You see them everywhere: dinosaur tee-shirts, dinosaur movies, dinosaur toys, even frosted-crunchy dinosaur cereal. Every museum has competed to offer an exhibit of Real! Live! dinosaurs that munch leaves, look you in the eye, roar, and move menacingly toward you. But there is more hype than fact in the current dinosaur craze. Not many people really understand what dinosaurs were. Even the name …

…fast, and probably warm-blooded. They were entirely successful, for great, long ages in their world. Whatever wiped them out, it wasn't their own inefficiency, because there was nothing to take their places in the ecosystem for millions of years, until mammals, freed from the domination of the great reptiles, diversified and claimed the world. And -- remember -- some of them are still here, raising their warm-blooded, feathered, but still scaly-legged young, generation after generation.