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The skull of Basilosaurus, from the 1907 Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution. In 1900 the famous bone sharp Barnum Brown discovered the skeleton of a huge carnivorous dinosaur in Wyoming, and near its bones were a few fossilized bony plates. When H.F. Osborn described this creature as Dynamosaurus imperiosus he used this association to hypothesize that this predator was covered in armor, but as it turned out "Dynamosaurus" was really a representative of another new dinosaur Osborn named Tyrannosaurus rex. Osborn's famous tyrant showed no sign of being covered with armor, and the bony body covering turned out to...

Last week, Seattle PI columnist Susan Paynter said that calling her "Hillary", or "Mrs. Clinton" is unfairly dismissive. (That column got enough reactions so that Paynter wrote this follow-up.) We should, said Paynter, call her "Senator Clinton". [snip] What's missing is her surname. Someone has apparently decided that Mrs. Clinton will be the first major single-name candidate since 1952, when Ike's P.R. gurus realized that "Eisenhower" was tough to fit on a bumper sticker.[snip] Mrs. Clinton announced her intentions via the Internet on a Web site called "Hillary for President. Incredibly, on the day of her announcement, the name "Clinton"...