6. The genetic similarities between birds and dinosaurs— more real every day, now that Rocky Mountain Museum paleontologists Mary Schweitzer and John Homer have isolated what appear to be fragments of saurian DNA in a T. rex bone. It should be noted that Schweitzer is turning much of what we thought we knew about the process of fossilization upside down. Every new class of paleontology students has learned from textbooks that fossils are mere images of once living matter, with none of the living matter remaining intact. (Pellegrino and Wygodzinski proved in 1978 that amber-ized insects were an astonishing exception to the rule; but they were only partly correct because amber, while offering the best known protection against the ravages of time, might now be more rule than exception.) As for where this self-perpetuating textbook dogma originated, Pellegrino has been able to trace it back to the discovery of hollow impressions in the volcanic ash of Pompeii during the 19th century. When the hollows were filled with plaster, and the ash was scraped away, images of people could be seen. By analogy, silica and other minerals were said to have replaced bones and shells in the fossil record, and thus did a freak occurrence come to represent the norm.

Now we know better. In addition to Schweitzer’s T. rex, a second well-preserved bone (an Allosaurus femur) came to light when UPS delivered it broken in half to fossil-hunter Mark Newman, who noticed a startlingly intact marrow-like substance spilling out of the interior and remarked, “I know someone who may be interested in this.” The bone was promptly passed on to Pellegrino who, with James Powell, identified under an electron microscope what looked for all the world like marrow vesicles and even blood cells whose histology was hauntingly reminiscent of “ostrich.” Mary Schweitzer (who appears in Chapter 17) subsequently confirmed that our Jurassic sample looked chillingly like what she was pulling out of the Cretaceous Period. She suspects that as much as forty percent of some fossil bones may consist of original (albeit degraded) organic material. Now that (according to preliminary results) the first minute fragments of T. rex DNA may be in hand (with Allosaur DNA next in line) Schweitzer’s ongoing analysis suggests that paleontologist Robert Bakker (long thought to be a bit too crazy about birds) was right all along: some dinosaurs were so closely related to birds as to be practically sibling species. After all is said and done, Tyrannosaurs and Allosaurs begin to look like parakeets designed by Stephen King.

7. The mysterious preservation of sheets of paper on the Titanic, while sheets of inch-thick steel have deteriorated, is a fact and not a fiction. In fact, in one corner of the Titanic debris field, bacterial dissolution had erased boiler casings and iron stairways from existence, leaving only a scrap of newspaper dated April 10, 1912, still taunting us with words of the maiden voyage “of the world’s largest luxury liner … unsinkable.” 8. As with the artificial boosting of human intelligence, several of the fictions presented here threaten to become outdated by the realities of scientific achievement before this book sees a paperback printing. For example, the bags of mail referred to in Chapter 4 have, since the writing of that chapter, been found intact by a deeppenetrating Titanic robot named Robin. Discussions are now under way to save these documents from advancing streams of iron oxides and bacteria-laden sludge, and to restore them for eventual museum display (we wish George Tulloch and Arnie Geller Godspeed). Meanwhile, a Berkeley pathologist has announced plans to clone an amber-embedded virus of Cretaceous age. Before he risks yanking Leslie Wells’s mistakes from the realm of fiction, we beg that he put aside dreams of a Jurassic Park until he has taken a second look at Michael Crichton’s first novel.