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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...

A woman got a 30-day jail sentence for leaving her three young children home alone for several hours while she and her boyfriend attended a videotaping of "The Jerry Springer Show." Shannon Cook, 25, pleaded guilty earlier this week to misdemeanor child endangerment. She also was placed on probation for a year. The two girls and one boy, all under the age of 4, have been placed in foster homes... Police said Cook left the children alone at a suburban home Oct. 19 while she and her boyfriend went to Chicago for the taping. About five hours later, the two...