It is always a thrill to see attention paid to paleontology, likely the most popular of sciences, but also the least well funded in this day of dominance by the white coat and test tube crowd. It is almost as if there is something less "pure" about researchers who wear dirty and frequently jeans, boots, torn shirts and use plaster and burlap, hammers and picks, and big folded topographic maps, and more than likely as not find pleasure in a cooler filled with the cheapest, but cold, beer at the end of a long day in the field.

But paleontology is also known for wonderous claims of the largest, meanest, ugliest, smallest, deadest, this or that, ever beheld by the eyes of humans. I suspect this goes along with the need for paleontologists to get anyone to pay attention to wat they do, and may be a primal urge for affetion so long denied the science. Thus, it is interesting to see the new "biggest" and "fiercest" claims, this time an aquatic reptile. Of course the evidence seems to hinge on a hinge (how large the articulation is of the way the skull attached to the body). In a world where a scientist says size matters, I guess it does, but the comparisons are almost always to T. rex, that terror of the latest time in the Age of Dinosaurs. Unfortunately, this new aquatic beast lived perhaps 80,000,000 years before the first T. rex took or exhaled a foul breath, and is not even a dinosaur and is not even a land animal. Land animals always have a rougher time overcoming gravity, not a problem for a creature in the ocean. This strikes me as comparing apples and everything else--why a modern shrew may eat twice its weight a day (now that is fierce), but at an ounce or two is so much smaller than a killer whale (not nearly as fierce). I think it was the great French anatomist Buffon (or was it Cuvier?) who seems to have claimed he could reconstruct an entire animal from a toe. Well maybe we can (sometimes). But I do think it would be great fun, if this new monster with a 10 foot skull (much bigger than the 5 foot skull of T. rex) had a lean, mean compact body only 3 feet more in length. Now, that would be refreshingly new: the largest skull to body ratio ever discovered.