One of my favorite comedies with Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn is Bringing up Baby, a 1938 film that never fails to delight. In it Grant plays a very serious anthropologist, David Huxley, whose life project is putting together the huge skeleton of a dinosaur. The only thing missing is one small fossil bone that gets lost when a terrier, belonging to Susan Vance (Katherine Hepburn), steals it and then buries it in an unknown location in the garden of a large estate.

I love to see the professor balancing precariously on a huge scaffold that leads to the top of his mean-looking dinosaur skeleton, and with pleasurable anticipation wait for the inevitable disaster that follows. The word dinosaur (or dinosauria), by the way, was first coined in 1841 by Sir Richard Owen (1804-1892), an English anatomist and naturalist. He combined the Greek words 'deinos'(terrible) with 'saurus' (lizard) to describe these "fearfully great reptiles", namely Megalosaurus, Iguanodon, and Hylaeosaurus, the only three dinosaurs known at the time.

Well, a great many ideas about dinosaurs have changed since 1938, when Bringing up Baby hit the screens. While we may laugh at Grant and Hepburn in the screwball comedy, named for a pet leopard that plays a great role in the film, we won't laugh at the efforts of paleontologist Stephen Czerkas and his wife, Sylvia. She is also the editor of an illustrated scientific volume, Feathered Dinosaurs and the Origin of Flight that can . . .

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