biology: The study of living things. The scientists who study them are known as biologists.
birds: Warm-blooded dinosaurs with wings that first showed up at least 150 million years ago. Birds are jacketed in feathers and produce young from the eggs they deposit in some sort of nest. Most birds fly, but throughout history there have been the occasional species that don’t.
colleague: Someone who works with another; a co-worker or team member.
data: Facts and/or statistics collected together for analysis but not necessarily organized in a way that gives them meaning. For digital information (the type stored by computers), those data typically are numbers stored in a binary code, portrayed as strings of zeros and ones.
dinosaur: A term that means terrible lizard. These reptiles emerged around 243 million years ago. All descended from egg-laying reptiles known as archosaurs. Their descendants eventually split into two lines. For many decades, they have been distinguished by their hips. The lizard-hipped line are believed to have led to the saurischians, such as two-footed theropods like T. rex and the lumbering four-footed Apatosaurus. A second line of so-called bird-hipped, or ornithischian dinosaurs, appears to have led to a widely differing group of animals that included the stegosaurs and duckbilled dinosaurs. Many large dinosaurs died out around 66 million years ago. But some saurischians lived on. They are now the birds we see today (and who have now evolved that so-called “bird-hipped” pelvis).
equation: In mathematics, the statement that two quantities are equal. In geometry, equations are often used to determine the shape of a curve or surface.
fossil: Any preserved remains or traces of ancient life. There are many different types of fossils: The bones and other body parts of dinosaurs are called “body fossils.” Things like footprints are called “trace fossils.” Even specimens of dinosaur poop are fossils. The process of forming fossils is called fossilization.
fowl: Wild chickens, ducks, geese, pheasants and turkeys. When raised by people, these same species are referred to as poultry.
glass: A hard, brittle substance made from silica, a mineral found in sand. Glass usually is transparent and fairly inert (chemically nonreactive). Aquatic organisms called diatoms build their shells of it.
journal: (in science) A publication in which scientists share their research findings with experts (and sometimes even the public). Some journals publish papers from all fields of science, technology, engineering and math, while others are specific to a single subject. Peer-reviewed journals are the gold standard: They send all submitted articles to outside experts to be read and critiqued. The goal, here, is to prevent the publication of mistakes, fraud or work that is not novel or convincingly demonstrated.
mammal: An animal distinguished by possessing hair or fur, the secretion of milk by females for the feeding of their young, and (typically) the bearing of live young. They also are warm-blooded (or endothermic).
paleobiologist: A scientist who studies organisms that lived in ancient times — especially geologically ancient periods, such as the dinosaur era.
physiologist: A scientist who studies the branch of biology that deals with how the bodies of healthy organisms function under normal circumstances.
sauropod: A very large, four-legged, plant-eating dinosaur with a long neck and tail, small head and massive limbs.
Tyrannosaurus rex: A top-predator dinosaur that roamed Earth during the late Cretaceous period. Adults could be 12 meters (40 feet) long.
Velociraptor: A genus of predatory bird-like dinosaurs with a relatively large brain and a long, sharp claw on each foot. Its fossils were first discovered in the 1920s in what is now Mongolia. The roughly meter-tall animal moved on two feet and injured/maimed It would not have been as daunting as its namesake portrayed in the Jurassic Park movie franchise. Many scientists believe that movie version was actually Deinonychus, a dinosaur twice this dino’s size and known from fossils unearthed in the United States during the 1960s.
X-ray: A type of radiation analogous to gamma rays, but having somewhat lower energy.