Nothing common, actually, aside from the desire to keep out food and other things that promote pests. We use a lot of different chemicals for consolidating, cleaning, and protecting fossils—depending on the fossil and its needs. So we keep those in one place and bring them to the fossils as needed. Even things like…

Honestly, we have very little knowledge of the actual plants that specific dinosaurs ate. We know a lot about the kinds of plants that were around, just not which ones went into which dinosaur's maw.

It's not clear how oxygen relates to size evolution, but that's one hypothesis out there. I tend to think that evolution takes advantage of opportunity until some sort of limit is reached, and dinosaurs had different limits than modern mammals. In fact, I'd say the real question is why mammals (at least on land) are…

Hmm…to get technical, probably a parrot or a zebra finch ;)

Yes! All birds are dinosaurs - they descended from dinosaurs similar to Velociraptor, and so are just another group of dinosaurs. All other dinosaurs are not birds - that includes horned and armored forms (ceratopsians, ankylosaurs, stegosaurs), duck-bills and their relatives (ornithopods), long-necked giant…

Honestly, I doubt that dinosaurs were on the way to intelligence any differently than they evolved in the world we know—namely, that we'd end up with "smart" dinosaurs in the form of parrots and crows and other birds. There's not much of a trend aside from that toward really enhanced brain evolution in other…

Right now, there are perhaps a couple of dozen species of theropod dinosaurs with actual feathers (or filaments) preserved on their skin. But because they are distributed across the family tree of theropods, we would predict that feathers appeared only once in the common ancestor of these forms, and that we're just…

Of course, I prefer the evocative Brontosaurus (thunder lizard) to the "eh" name Apatosaurus (deceptive lizard)!

I do not actually agree that the K/T extinction took hours or even days. I don't think that the immediate impact is what actually physically killed most dinosaurs outside North America and perhaps northern South America. I think it is much more likely that the downstream effects—still direct, but not immediate–were…

Jurassic Park is mostly a blessing. The biggest thing for me is that it made dinosaurs appealing to adults as well as children, and that made museums take notice. So whereas in the 1980s, most major museums had very old exhibits and no one on staff who studied dinosaurs, since JP nearly all of them have renovated and…