Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
7
Virtual
Ammonites
How can we reconstruct the life of an extinct animal, such as an ancient
ammonite? How is it that paleontologists have revivified dinosaurs as agile
and obstreperous? How can they assert that a pterodactyl could fly rather
than simply glide? These and many more feats of apparent sorcery fill the sci-
entific journals and sometimes spill over onto the wide screen and the wider
popular consciousness. They derive from a type of scientific analysis called
functional morphology, which is a way of studying biological structures to
determine not how they looked but how they worked and what they did.
This form of analysis is among the most useful of time machines.
