Dinosaur dreamer. (Endpaper).(Los Angeles in the dinosaur age)(Brief Article)

Publication: Natural History

Publication Date: 01-FEB-02

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COPYRIGHT 2002 Natural History Magazine, Inc.

As odd as it may seem, Los Angeles is a particularly good place to become a paleontologist. As a young boy, I didn't always appreciate this. But on rare days when a hair-dryer wind from the desert blew the smog offshore, I would lope up to a hilltop street appropriately named Grandview. The cleansing wind would open the usual view--a bristle of telephone poles and TV antennas rising in the haze--to the whole sweep of the Pacific and the San Gabriel Mountains.

I hardly seemed cut out for bone hunting. I was not much of an athlete and so nearsighted that by third grade I wore gigantic tortoiseshell glasses. But I could run fast and...

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