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Agenda 03-27-03
COMMUNITY REDEVELOPMENT AGENCY Workshop Meeting Thursday, February March 27, 2003 6:30 P.M. City Hall West Wing 2nd Floor Planning & Zoning Conference Room C Boynton Beach I. Call to Order. II. Work Shop A. "Savage Creatures of Ancient Seas Museum Complex" III. Other Items: IV. Adjournment. Any person who decides to appeal any decision of the Community Redevelopment Board with respect to any matter considered at this meeting will need a record of the proceedings and for such purpose may need to ensure that a verbatim record of the proceedings is made, which record includes the testimony and evidence upon which the appeal is to be based. The CRA shall furnish appropriate auxiliary aids and services where necessary to afford an individual with a disability an equal opportunity to participate in and enjoy the benefits of a service, program, or activity conducted by the CRA. Please contact Douglas Hutchinson at 561-737-3256 at least twenty-four hours prior to the program or activity in order for the CRA to reasonably accommodate your request. Budgeted U/-I.-UO Budgeted UO-UO Budgeted UO-U ! Budgeted U/-UU Budgeted Personel Cost Salaries Total Salaries Payroll Taxes Workers Comp Health Insurance Life Insurance SEP IRA Total Personel Cost Professional Services Legal City Staff Contracted Services Audit Maint. & Cleaning I.T. Support Total Professional Services Office Rent Expense Phone Expense Electric Expense Water/Sewed Trash Office Total Equipment Leases Expenses Insurance Property Insurance Bond/Liability Insurance Professional Insurance Insurance Total Travel Expense Business Meetings Seminars Mileage & Delivery Services Car Allowance- Director Total Travel Expenses Office Supplies Office Expense Office Supplies Total Office Supplies Licenses, Books, Publication Licenses, Fees, Permits Memberships, Subscriptions Books & Publication Total Licenses, Books, Publicati Advertising & Public Notices Career Development Printing Office Expense Miscellaneous Expense Debt Service Loan Payment Economic Incentives BBB/Promenade/Riverwalk Parking Garage Construction Savage Creatures Projects Sinking Fund for Debt Total Debt Service 197,500.00 14,812.50 1,824.00 16,800.00 180.00 8,375.00 239,491.50 30,000.00 6,000.00 150,000.00 7,5O0.0O 5,400.00 13,360.00 212,260.00 14,400.00 8,190.00 1,440.00 0.00 24,030.00 4,356.00 378.00 2,000.00 4,200.00 6,578.00 3,600.00 5,100.00 480.00 1,680.00 10,860.00 1,500.00 2,500.00 4,000.00 1,250.00 2,792.00 500.00 4,542.00 4,000.00 3,000.00 1,500.00 500.00 317,298.28 260,000.00 380,000.00 50,000.00 1,007,298.28 204,500.00 15,337.50 1,824.00 18,312.00 180.00 10,225.00 250,378.50 30,000.00 6,600.00 75,000.00 8,500.00 5,400.00 13,730.00 139,230.00 28,880.00 8,6O0.00 2,880.00 2,000.00 42,360.00 4,356.00 416.00 2,200.00 4,620.00 7,236.00 4,800.00 5,100.00 480.00 1,680.00 12,060.00 1,500.00 2,500.00 4,000.00 1,250.00 3,000.00 500.00 4,750.00 4,000.00 3,000.00 1,500.00 500.00 317,298.28 200,000.00 300,000.00 82,500.00 270,000.00 50,000.00 1,219,798.28 210,635.00 15,797.63 1,920.00 19,992.00 180.00 10,531.75 259,056.38 30,000.00 7,200.00 75,000.00 8,500.00 5,400.00 14,112.00 140,212.00 28,880.00 9,030.00 2,880.00 2,000.00 42,790.00 5,448.00 458.00 2,420.00 5,082.00 7,960.00 6,000.00 5,100.00 480.00 1,680.00 13,260.00 1,500.00 2,500.00 4,000.00 1,250.00 3,000.00 500.00 4,750.00 4,000.00 3,000.00 1,500.00 500.00 317,298.28 200,000.00 300,000.00 275,000.00 900,000.00 167,500.00 2,159,798.28 256,972.00 19,272.90 2,496.00 26,790.00 180.00 10,848.60 316,559.50 30,000.00 7,800.00 75,000.00 10,000.00 5,400.00 14,506.00 142,706.00 28,880.00 9,300.00 2,880.00 2,000.00 43,060.00 5,448.00 504.00 2,662.00 5,590.00 8,756.00 6,000.00 5,100.00 480.00 1,680.00 13,260.00 264,675.00 19,850.63 2,520.00 30,000.00 180.00 13,233.75 330,459.38 30,000.00 8,400.00 75,000.00 10,000.00 5,400.00 14,911.00 143,711.00 28,880.00 9,765.00 2,880.00 2,000.00 43,525.00 5,448.00 554.00 2,928.00 6,149.00 9,631.00 6,000.00 5,100.00 480.00 1,680.00 13,260.00 1,500.00 2,500.00 1,500.00 2,500.00 4,000.00 1,250.00 3,000.00 500.00 4,000.00 1,250.00 3,000.00 500.00 4,750.00 4,000.00 3,000.00 1,500.00 500.00 317,298.28 200,000.00 300,000.00 275,000.00 900,000.00 167,500.00 2,159,798.28 4,750.00 4,000.00 3,000.00 1,500.00 500.00 317,298.28 200,000.00 300,000.00 275,000.00 900,000.00 167,500.00 2,159,798.28 Operating Expense 1,522,415.78 1,693,t68.78 2,646,274.66 2,707,337.78 2,723,582.66 0 0 0 0 0 0 ~ o ~ . . . o o o o o o o o ooo ~~~~~ ~ 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 ~ ~ ~ 0 0 0 0 ~ 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 ............~,~ ~ ~ ',el' 0 · r- 0 I 0 [} I N¢)~,A U RS; 5 Ibc h~ s c ~d' ils hilt. l"l'icks~m ~lls~ inlcmtcd Io rcl:~ ~11 his h(dy lxtrls, ~xhich cxpbincd his S~'Fi~)t]~ L ( )1111JCI1~111CC. t(~k~c.I ,ind thc i,tpc. Thc nnimal %~cncd it~ cvc~ vcnl~n~. Thc m~md~ ~q~cncd ~s dmvlv ~s ~t dhow. cm~u~h h~ h~m~c ~ poodle. Krick~on presented thc I~u'cc Iransduccr lo thc hu'~csl Ioolh al Iht h~ck ~H' thc righl upper j~w ~nd thc mw~ thc ~tl~', p~dc th'rely ch~mpcd, hc~m m lurch hi~, ,,.tircctic. n. I~ut then thc aniimtl calmed d~wn. t'Lrick~on rc~d s~m~c numbers olt' ~t meier. "'lwo p~inl reline ~ix th~it's ~/ h)l)" hc ~)id. Thc crc~uunA j~w~ h~d come t(~clhcr with nC~il'Jv .~,()()()p(~umt~ (d' lhr~c. Thc ~dd Ihim)~ ~il~til lhN lillIc experiment w~)s theft it wa~ f'und~m~cnt~dh' aJ~mI I~ricks~m, ,~ palcd~i~l~ist ~t Fhu'ida ~hllc vcrsily, is ~m expert in thc Fccdil~ hch~vi~r ~1' Ivnmm~s~u,rs, includin~ Iht hilt marks ]cfi hones. Th~tl rcsc~rch spurred him t~ lind more ahout hilts in ~cncr;~l, which is why he's m.t hcrc m~mti~htin~ with crocodilbns. Wc h~dcd Mr. I~i~ ~m ~m ~irho~u to hc ovcrhtnd h~ck h~m~c to I,~kc t;rit'fin, hour to the south. We spent the night lakeside, testing ten more gators that had been freshly yanked from the water. All the while, we talked about dinosaurs. Shortly before dawn--by which time we were thoroughly scuffed up and swampy, though still in possession of all our digits--Erickson turned to me and said, "It's not like diggin' bones, is it?" Bone-diggin' is still essential, but an increas- ing number of vertebrate paleontologists are going beyond the bones, looking for novel ways to study dinosaurs. Instead of spending the summer in a dusty badlands bone bed, they might spend it in a laboratory, analyzing/he evolution of the flight stroke hy tossing pigeons into a wind tunnel. Instead of scraping away thc sandstone over- burden on a nicely articulated ceratopsian, they might point and click on a computer screen, pivoting digital hones. rFhese paleontologists tend to be on the young and idealistic side, determined to intensify the scientific rigor of their profession. Their goal is to hunt not just tbr dinosaurs but for something even harder to reconstruct--how dinosaurs fimctioned and behaved. They are tackling difficult queslions: Were dinosaurs fleet of foot or ponderous? What did they eat? Did they hunt or migrate in packs? Did they parent their young? }tow fast did they grow? [)id they get bigger and bigger even into old age? And how old did they get? Did they use horns and frills and spikes in battle, like they do in the ~novies? Were these unusual anatomical structures part of the busi- ness of attracting mates? blow did one group of these creatures develop the ability to fly? These new scientists are a diverse bunch, emerging from evolutionary biology, biome- chanics, botany, physiology. Their tools include computers, (7I' scans, x rays, and electron microscopes. They publish papers with titles Dike "Nostril Position in Dinosaurs and Other Ver- tebrates and Its Significance for Nasal Function" and "Caudotbmorat Musculature and the Evo- k~tion of Theropod l,ocomotion." We might say they are geckier than thc older generation of dinosaur researchers, and then quickly add that we mean this in thc best sense of the word. Make no mistake, the "ficld"--which is any- where and everywhere bones can be fimnd-- still dominates dinosaur research. In recent years the field has produced feathered dinosaurs from China, egg-laying dinosaurs from Patagonia, and a host of new dinosaur species, such as the scale- breaking Ar.ge~ltinos,iurus and the fearsome Gigatum~saurus. In the field we find direct evi- dence of a lost world (Cotztmued on page 14) laving l argc Was I' rex a s, peed demon:' Probaltl¥ not, the pace for a videft taped in [h/lllalld (ill-)ore mark their joints, allowing Stanford Univer- sity biologist John Hutchinson and colleagues to analyze their motion with a computer. "Elephants are upholding the theory that a very large body size limits speed," he says. Calculations based on a T rex model (top, inset) offer more sllpport. For T. rex to run at 45 miles an hour, as some scientists think it did, as much as 90 percent of its body would have to have been leg muscle. "That's ridiculous," says Hutchinson. 7~ rex probably didn't move much faster than an elephant, "Of course, a 13,000-pound animal moving at that speed still would be a horrendous sight." I) INOSAURS 9 Wh¢ii lVlC" (~. Jl'C.a' t)'"~l cSC. lltcd-~ his lli;iSt¢l"S thesis, hc j )kinglv. Y~)t~ l:c~ow, two dil~()sau~'s mating. Rct t lian passi n cai tt cd in sterne. Thc )fcsso s were (Continued from page 8) ruled by titanic crea- tures, thriving all over the globe from 230 to 65 million years ago, during the Mesozoic era. And the field has charms that the laboratory can't match. The field is the staging ground for that whole Indiana }ones thing, for the type of charismatic, rock-star scientists who hang out in dinosaur graveyards with shovels, picks, plaster, graduate students, and personal documentary film crews. not visibly amused. example, that Tyrannosaurus rex, the very emblem of predation, the killer of killers, was actually just a scavenger, an eater of the dead. An overgrown turkey vulture! Those banana- size teeth weren't for ripping live flesh, says Horner, they were for crushing the bones of a carcass. This is vintage contrarianism, and Horner so far has failed to persuade many of his peers, who point out that ?~ rex need not have been But perhaps the very glamour of dinosaurs has spawned the backlash, the willful retreat to scientific basics by Greg Erickson and research- ers like him. Most scientific disciplines aren't caught in the gravity well of public fascination. If you study fossil mollusks, for example, you aren't likely to be asked to become a scientific adviser for a Hollywood blockbuster. No one has snail fever. But dinosaur fans are insatiable for information. The new generation of scientists wants to put constraints on all the hypotheses flying around, and they think that the truth about dinosaurs--and dinosaur behavior-- won't be uncovered with bones alone. "For 20 years we've done what we call arm- waving," says Jack Homer, a legendary bone collector. "We've made hypotheses based on very little evidence. Now we're sitting down, we're saying, 'We've got all these ideas, are they real?'" Homer can arm-wave like a champ, as he will admit. Since 1991 he's been arguing, for one thing or another. Hyenas, for example, are scavengers one day, predators the next. But in any case this is precisely the kind of argument that can't be won by speaking louder than one's opponents. Science requires data. Science requires that ideas be subjected to tests. And paleontology--if the new generation has its way--will be seen as a no-nonsense field, a hard science, in addition to being a thrill- ing subject built around the bones of large, scary animals. r I~ his is where we have the rhino heads and the manatee heads;' Lawrence Wit- mer is saying. "We've got a whole bin of ostrich heads and necks. We've got ducks and geese. Here's a bag of alligator parts." We're in the deep freeze of his laboratory at Ohio University in Athens. Witmer has quite the collection of heads. They belonged to creatures that died, or were killed for some other reason, and were then obtained by Witmer for research. 14 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC ° MARCH 2003 told thc professors he'd love I keep thinking Witmer is about to produce the horse head from The Godfather. Witmer reconstructs the soft tissues in dino- saur heads. His method exploits similarities among creatures across the vastness of time. It turns out that a dinosaur of the Triassic period, 248 to 206 million years ago, had anatomical features remarkably similar to those of a con- temporary alligator or seagull. Witmer recently caused a stir when he said that artists had long put the nostrils of dino- saurs too high on the head. He spent months studying the relative positions of noses and nos- trils in modern animals. He wanted to see if there is a correlation--whether the bone of the nose reveals the location of the fleshy nostril. He found that as a rule there is such a correlation. Witmer then examined fossils and discovered that in modern renditions of dinosaurs the nos- trils had always, been misplaced. They should be shown low on the nose, near the mouth. Nos- trils in that location would heighten the ani- mal's ability to nuzzle a potential food item and decide whether it was biteworthy. Witmer investigated another paleontological presumption, the notion that Triceratops and other plant-eating dinosaurs had cheeks, like cows or horses or humans. Conventional wis- dom said these cheeks were like feed bags, help- ing the animal chew and re-chew vegetation. Witmer, to his surprise, discovered that animals with cheeks have bone structures that are lack- ing in Tricerato?s and other herbivorous dino- saurs. Triceratops, he thinks, had something more like a bill or a beak. The plant-eating dinosaurs may have clipped vegetation off plants with these beaks and then to find a six-fi)otcd trackway. swallowed the material pretty much intact. "They probably actually chewed with their stomachs," Witmer says. The day I visited, Witmer took maybe 15 animal heads out of the freezer and arranged them on a table, a buffet from a nightmare. He explained how he dissects them to examine soft tissues and how he uses his findings to flesh out model dinosaur heads. As we talked, the heads thawed. They got rather.., drippy. Beyond ripe. The moose head seemed particularly malodor- ous. "Most of these guys are past their sell-by date," Witmer said, unfazed. A tbw hours later, putting the heads back in the freezer and mopping up the mess, he said, Stranger thao science fiction, these rela- tives of Triceratops--Einiosaurus, Pachyrhino- saur~s, and Styracosa~r[~s, left to right-- foraged 70 million years ago in what is now North America. Each species displays unique adult head ornaments, but all have similar basic anatomy. "The coot thing is that the young from all the species look alike," says Catherine Forster, a paleontologist at SUNY, Stony Brook. "It's only when they mature that they get the different horns and spikes-- possibly for some kind of sexual display.' "There's no real substitute for doing what we're doing--getting your hands dirty, rolling up your sleeves, getting out a scalpel, and seeing how these things are really put together." Stephen Gatesy is another pioneer of the new dinosaur science and can spend days at his computer screen zeroed in on a single tro- chanter, the knobby protrusion on a bone where a tendon once attached. He might spend months or even years on a shoulder joint. "l'm not ambitious enough to take on the whole animal," he told me when I visited him at Brown University. That's a classic statement of the new science. Think of how dinosaur paleontology has been dominated by "the whole animal," by spectacu- lar specimens, huge skeletons that can fill the entrance hall of a museum. This fellow Gatesy can get wrapped up in a single metatarsal. A traditional dinosaur researcher might take a couple of loose dinosaur bones, stick them DINOSAURS 15 Reflectors mark a mere fraction of the dino- saur nests smothered by a flood 80 million years ago at Auca Mahuevo in Patagonia. l_uis Chiappe, at left, and Rodolfo Coria have found thousands of egg clutches, with rio end in sight, Rare intact eggs have unmistak- ably revealed the embryos of titanosaurs, together at the joint, wiggle them, pivot them, move them around, and pronounce, "I think they went like this." Gatesy wants to do the hard labor of figuring out how these structures evolved and affected locomotion--how dino- saur ancestors, for example, went from walking on four legs to walking on two (and apparently back to walking on four in some cases). Thrown into the mix is the stunning fact that some dinosaurs lifted off the ground entirely. How did flight develop? Did the first airborne dinosaurs merely glide, or did they flap? Did the flight stroke evolve from other types of motion, such as grabbing prey or trying to elude a predator? Were they flappers before they were fliers? Or did flying emerge from climbing? The flight stroke might have given an animal increased traction on steep inclines. There's recent research at the University of Montana showing that baby birds, for example, start flap- ping when ascending an incline. They're not try- ing to fly, just trying to climb better. Anatomy can be deceiving. Birds have hollow bones, feathers, wings, reduced tails, and wish- bones, each characteristic designed for flight. And yet each of these traits or something like it appears in the fossil record before birds flew. The dinosaur fossil record is actually rather poor. Intact, articulated, museum-quality skele- tons are fairly rare. Fossils fall apart. A bone exposed to the elements may simply explode. In some bone beds there are so many tiny skeletal fragments you'd think the creatures had been dropped from a plane. That's why dinosaur behavior is so diffi- cult to fathom from just bones--why the task of understanding dinosaurs is truly like trying to squeeze blood from a stone. Some would argue that dinosaur behavior is a topic all too similar to extraterrestrial life--long on specu- lation and short on data. Gatesy and other paleobiologists are struggling 18 NIA'[IOIMAL GEOGRAPHIC · MARCH 2.003 to ascend what Witmer calls the Inverted Pyra- mid of Inference. Imagine an upside-down pyramid with, at the pointed bottom, the word "bones." Bones are the known commodity, the solid evidence. They are aged; they may be broken, cracked, ambiguous. But you can at least hold them in your hand. Above bones on the inverted pyramid are soft tissues. There aren't many of those because they rarely fossilize. Above that is function, how the bones and tis- sues worked. Above that--so very fhr from the hard evidence of bones--is behavior. Above that is environmental interaction. The dream would be to know the behaviors of many different dinosaurs and to be able to put them in context so you'd know what dinosaurs ate and where they slept and what they feared and how they prowled the landscape. And at the very top of the inverted pyramid, as far from hard science as you can get, is... well, probably the purple dinosaur known as Barney. Dinosaurwas inherently science flam- boyant and mind-boggling from its very beginning. In 1853 paleontologist Richard Owen (who had given dinosaurs their name a little more than a decade earlier) staged a celebrated sit-down dinner in London. He and 21 other scientists dined at a table set up inside a model of an lguanodon. An engraving of the scene cre- ated a national sensation in Great Britain. Bone hunters scrambled to find ever more spectacular specimens. By the early 20th cen- tury the preeminent ambition in the field was to mount a skeleton dramatic enough to scare the bejabbers out of a schoolchild. Roy Chapman Andrews's journeys to Mon- golia's Gobi in the 1920s were worthy of a Cecil B. DeMille movie--great caravans of camels stretching into the wasteland, with Andrews packing a pistol and posing on bluffs with jaw thrust forward. But just two decades later the heroic age of dinosaur collecting was over. Scientists began to view dinosaurs as an evolutionary dead end. They were tail-dragging losers in a Darwinian world, defeated by quicker, smarter mammals. "It is a tale of the triumph of brawn, a triumph that was long-lived, but which in the end gave way to the triumph of brain," wrote Edwin H. Colbert of the American Museum of Natural His- tory in his 1945 publication, The Dinosaur Book. The field was in the doldrums when in 1975 Robert Bakker, a maverick paleontologist at Har- vard, published an article in Scientific American titled "Dinosaur Renaissance." It gave a shot of adrenaline to the entire discipline. Bakker, build- ing on the work of his mentor, Yale's John Ostrom, said that dinosaurs were not cold- blooded, but rather warm-blooded, active, quick. They may have nurtured their young and DINOSAURS 19 l',~vo jaws ph,s thousands of other Alberto- saur~s bones found near Canada's Red Deer Ri~er add tip tO signs of pack ht~nting. Younger, faster anilnals likely ran down tbe prey, says Philip Curl'ie, a curator at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Alberta With a nastier bite, a(lults then moved in for the kill. hunted in packs. And they weren't even extincfi Birds, Bakker said (again, echoing Ostrom), are themselves the direct descendants of dinosaurs. The new image carried the day. In the l~r~s- sic Park movies the dinosaurs are fully Ba~er- ian. They sprint across meadows. They nurture their young. The "raptors" are so sawy they seem on the verge of inventing spacetlight. "I'm a method paleontologist," Bakker said one day in Boulder, Colorado. He means like a method actor~like Robert De Niro or Marion Brando. "1 want to be Jurassic. I want to smell what the megalosaur smells, I want to see what he sees." From a cigar box on the table he pulled a ~ rex tooth. "This is a bullet¢' he said. A fossil site is a crime scene, he explained, and the teeth are the bullets. He thinks he's found evidence in the teeth of alJosaurs, meat-eaters of the Juras- sic, that those dinosaurs dragged huge prey to their nests to feed to their babies. As he puts it, "You're under care. Your first meal is given to you, and it's steak, and it's six feet thick." Since Bakker's been theorizing about dino- saurs tut more than a quarter century, J asked him if he thought dinosaur paleontology has become a more rigorous science with its new emphasis on lab work. He replied by citing an 1822 study of Ice Age hyenas by the Reverend William Buckland. Bakker says Buckland's work is as good as any modern paleontoio~. The pro- fession looks at history, Ba~er says~at the nar- rative of the rocks and bones. It can't possibly turn into a laboratory science. "People who don't understand paleontology try to make it physics¢' he said. "Paleontology is history. It is made up of millions and millions of crimes. There are victims and there are perps." Meanwhile, back at the lab .... John Hutchinson, a 30-year-old researcher at Stanford, wants to answer a big question: Could ~ rex run? If so, how fast? Did it have the leg muscles to sprint 45 miles an hour as some pale- ontologists contend? ~2 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC · MARCH 2003 Hutchinson doesn't think T. rex was that swift. He ponders T. rex through the prism of biome- chanics. "The dream goal is to reconstruct exactly how an extinct dinosaur moved;' he says. He uses a computer program that has digitized a number of T. rex bones. To run that fast, Hutchinson figures, T. rex would have to have been almost all leg. Chick- ens run well, but a 13,000-pound chicken, Hutchinson has calculated, would need to have 62 percent of its mass in each leg. Hutchinson also studies elephants and has made several trips to Thailand to analyze their locomotion. He paints white dots on elephants at crucial joints in the shoulders and legs. Then he chases the elephants, shouting "Bai, Bait" which means "Go, Go!" In videotapes he cap- tures the movement of the white dots. What Hutchinson sees in the tapes doesn't look like running. At least not exactly. "The best definition of walking is that the body swings over the leg like a stiff, inverted pendulum. Running is very different. It's like a pogo stick, a bouncing ball. Instead of the leg being stiff, it compresses like a spring. So you're using that spring to keep running efficiently. The spring stores energy." There are a couple of intermediate forms of locomotion, including what has been called the Groucho run, named after the bent-legged walk- ing that Groucho Marx made famous. Elephants are more on the Groucho side of things. They keep at least one leg on the ground at all times--like a walker--but the white dots move down then up, indicating a bouncing gait. Hutchinson showed me how to use his computer program to move muscles around, to attach them at different places on the bones, altering the leverage. By playing around, l'm pretty sure I created a dinosaur that couldn't do much of anything but fall over backwards. "I could spend all my life on this, analyzing every little data point," he said. "You have to have very well-defined questions, or else you'll just get submerged in data and never get anywhere." There'sanotherto observe dinosaur way behavior, and it doesn't involve bones or computers. Dinosaurs left tracks. One summer day I checked out some dino- saur tracks at an abandoned mine in the Rocky Mountain foothills near Grand Cache, Alberta, Canada. I was with Rich McCrea, a 33-year-old doctoral candidate at the University of Alberta, who has scrambled over almost every square inch of exposed rock. McCrea likes tracks. He says they're the closest he can come to live dinosaurs without using a time machine. When he presented his master's thesis, he jokingly told the professors he'd love to find a six-footed trackway. You know, two dinosaurs mating. Reptilian passion captured in stone. The professors were not visibly amused. DINOSAURS 23 The fact is, most dinosaur footprints capture a mundane activity: walking. In one direction, usually. ()ne of McCrea's associates jokes that, to judge by most dinosaur tracks, these creatures couldn't turn. The mine is at the end ora dusty road that until recently was heavily used by coal trucks. The miners sliced off a chunk of a mountain, and there's a wail of stone more than two miles long. At first you might not notice the prints. Then you see one or two, clearly outlined on the rock face. Then they gradually come into focus. The rock face is covered with footprints-- "totally polluted;' McCrea says admiringly. Some go this way, some go that way. There are quadrupeds and bipeds, plant-eaters and meat-eaters. Some tracks strongly suggest herd- ing behavior, and McCrea thinks there's evidence that meat-eaters stayed clear of the deep muck of coal-producing marshes. On some of the dark rock surti~ces, remnants of swampy terrain, there are only plant-eater tracks. They were probably ankylosaurs, McCrea says. "They're like Hum- vees, ti)ur-wheel drives." We climbed up a seam of broken rock, feet churning through coal fragments, and on a higher rock face found some theropod tracks, lbotprints that quite possibly had never been seen by a human being. The mine, after all, was a fairly recent operation, and the rock faces sheer off regularly, meaning there are always new exposures. Yet after a few hours of exploring, one also sees the limits of the trackway profes- sion. Footprints are just footprints. Other scien- tists have eventually given up on this site, McCrea says. "They couldn't handle the ambi- guities inherent in footprint research." A while back Steve Gatesy decoded some dinosaur footprints. He'd gone with some col- leagues to Greenland--yes, even the most ded- icated digital bone manipulators spend time in the field--and found thousands of tracks. They varied greatly, as though made by different spe- cies. Some tracks had an odd, bulbous structure at the end of the third digit, like a miniature vol- cano had erupted. What kind of feet left such odd prints? For help, Gatesy turned to a turkey. He and a student at Brown bought one from a nearby farm and coaxed it to walk across a variety of hard and soft surfaces, including thick mud. The turkey didn't (Continued on page 32) 26 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC ' MARCH 2003 (Continued from page.?6) much care fi)r this, but the tracks it crealc~t offered a revelation: All those different dinos~t~r footpl ints could have been made by the same species. What varied was not the type of animal but Iht lype of surface. And that odd, volca t~ic shape a! the end of the third digit? The turkey, and thc mud explained that too. As the foot g(~cs into the goop with toes spread, it makes the i~itial footprint. It strikes the hard subsurface then lifts again, bunching like a closed fist. The ,.:ntire foot emerges from the muck at the fronl of the track, creating a craterlike exit mark. It's arcane, to be s,~re, but science is often nothing more nor less than deconstructing what we're staring at. Theultimate dinosaur behavior the WaS act of going extinct. And the mystery of that event has hardly been solved. There's the easy, unsatisfactory answer: An extraterrestrial impact wiped them out. Quick, brutal, efficient. In documentaries there is the obligatory scene of the great impact, a flash of light, a blast wave, and the dinosaurs blowing away like leaves before a storm. But that can't be the whole story. Philip Currie, his mind 75 million years in the past, roams the valley of the Red Deer River in Dinosaur Provincial Park in southern Alberta. He's the quintessential field scientist, and he's been hauling dinosaurs out of the bad- lands here for more than a quarter century. I spent a day with Cuttle, stumbling over loose sandstones and mudstones, while he some- how remained perfectly upright, as though equipped with gyroscopes. It's not an easy work- place. Once a lightning bolt hit 30 feet from Cur- rte and left a smoking crater in the sand. Rain turns the surface to grease. A person can get lost in about three minutes. One of his top techni- cians bounced out of the back of a pickup-- 32 NATIONAL GEOGRAPlilC · MARCH 2003 a long story involving a misadventure at a saloon--and wandered all night while his col- leagues looked for him in ditches along road- ways. To treat himself to a fancy dinner, Currie goes to a bar in the town of Patricia--a com- munity that looks like it narrowly escaped extinction itself. Summers in this valley bring a bumper crop of knowledge. In one bone bed Currie found the skeletons of scores of centrosaurs. From the way the bones lay, it was clear to Currie that these creatures had died in water, and he inferred that they'd panicked while fording a swollen river. "This is probably the bone bed that got people talking about herding in a seri- ous way," he said. Currie has so far found 35 different species in Dinosaur Provincial Park. Farther up the Red Deer River, at Drumheller, where the fossils are around 70 million years old, there have been only about 20 species of dinosaurs found. And A new geoeration of dinosaurs debuts with lroody, a walking robot inspired by Troodon, Strutting across an MIT lab, she passes a Pro- toceratops in the works. Their creator, Peter Dilworth, plans more, covered with artificial skin. "It's a chance," he says "to let people see the varied forms life took over the eons." farther up the river, where the rock is 65 million years old, the last years of the Cretaceous period show only a few types of dinosaurs, including T. rex, Triceratops, and Ank?losaurus. So even before dinosaurs became extinct, they were disappearing in this part of the world. That is why it's so important for the discipline to go beyond the bones and truly understand these creatures and their environment. Something trig- gered a tremendous decline in biodiversity. The big impact may have been merely the final blow. The end of the Cretaceous was a time when the global climate was changing and the sea level dropping. A shallow sea that covered the heart of North America drained. Lands that were formerly separated by water were now connected. New species arrived, perhaps carry- ing deadly microbes. No wonder it's such a haunting scenario. Our world today is undergoing a climate change, a period of emerging pathogens, a rapid mixing of Earth's biota, a loss of biodiversity, and a vir- tual shrinking of the entire planet. Currie and I passed the afternoon in a remote part of the park, looking for new bone beds. We came upon a hillside covered with fragments, including some preserved inside unusually large nodules of ironstone. "Weird and different;' Cur- rie declared as he took a satellite reading of our position. Bone bed 185, he named it. It might yield some answers. Or it might yield nothing but shoulder bones--the kind you look at for a second, then toss over your shoul- der. But it was still exciting, because what we don't know about dinosaurs is far more than what we know. No matter how you practice it--with shovels or computer programs, with fossils or rhino Watch footage of this issue's heads from a freezer cover shoot; find more photo- --this is still a new graphs, tales from the field, and evolving science, and additional resources and We've just scratched links at nationalgeographic the surface. [3 .com/ngm/0303. DINOSAURS 33 DIVIDED LOYALTIES Landlords turn to arts as way to boost centers' traffic and sales i!~;?~, many shopping centers are looking for the next new thing to boost~ "i,&., !~!~ ~ .m~..)n Kansas is trying to do it with things that are old. Really old. 'i~ Sim¢~erty Group's West Ridge Mall Topeka, Kan, is the latest of ::sev..e~t~t:o mstali a museum. :~. W. '~'Kansas International Museum opened its first exhibit Imperial. ~randeur," last October in the ].1 mil- lion-square-foot mail, con- sidcred thcii~g~ail center of its e~hibit Of treasures from Russia's royal family '~:~ are based in a 112,?00- square-foot space that had housed a Montgomery Ward store that dosed in March 2001. The exhibit runs through March 15. Mall officials are bank- ing on the museum's doing a lot more for the mall than the defunct department store had done in its latter days. "We feel with the increased traffic, it's going to snowball into increased sales that will snowball into increased sales per square foot that will mmslate into more leasir~ activiw for us." said Arlin Meats. the mall's manager. Meats ~ic] e mall as museum Simon Prope~'~j Group hopes that Czarist treasures in an old Montgomery Ward store are drawing moro shoppers to its West Ridge Mall than the retailm di~. he expects the exhibits to dray vis t(,:'~ flora arom,d the state ami a five-state area that includes ©)lomdo, Iowa, M ~.$o.n i, Nebr:~s~t aad Okl~d~oma. This kind of museum-mail rta~rta,={: migh seem unumal, but the Kansas International Museum i~' k ~rd[y a first The Washington, D.C.- based Association of Childr..m's lx! 2se. ums say 20 of its member insti- tutions are also based in ret* il c .'r :ers. The B~ llevue (Wa&.) Art Mu- scum moved iuto the 1.3 mi~lion-sq~tare-foot Bellevue Sqaare mall in 1981 and remained there until it relocated to a stand.-alone site across lhe street in January 2001. Ther{ are also a number of s:>ecialty mu- seums located in shop- ping centers .at museum de&cated to New York Yankees g~eit Roger Marls, for imtance, oper- ates in th-' 990,000- sqaare-qoot, regional West Acres Shopping Center, Fargo, N.D. In one case, a museum has even completely ta,ce:~ ov{r a center: Las Vegas' Liberace Plaza, which pays homage to t} e late. ~ccent~ic pianist (the museum displays what it says is the lmges;: rhinestone in tke world), resides in a former ~rrin center. Museum, w'h~ch leases the former M,,nt~ gomery Ward ~pac:e and Hrst m~ved limo COlllpanv that manages it, Tt,pckaA~sed (}ultura[ Exhibitions and Events. Cultural Exhibition>, which puls ~n exhibits across thc United St~tes, was formed shortly a~tcr an earlier Rtts>ian czar exhibit came to Topeka m 1995. Tha~ cxhil,it, x~h,~e displays were siun- Frbcrgd e~,~, to~ m~tance, and other riches that tl~e Ic;iders of imperialist Russia enjoyed reportedly drew 500,000 people to Kansas' capital c~ty. ('uhural Exhihitkms executives said they chose Topeka as the museum's kmndmg place because it is their city of demand k>r ~t. Cultttral Exhibitions expects the turnout for this exhibit to at least equal the 1995 showing, but would not disclose the number of visitors so far. The compa- ny plans to f~.'ature one exhibit as large as "(;zars" at tJ'~e museum per year, along with a sinai[er one of shorter duration. Tentatively planned exhibits include a Japanese show and a partnership of some sort with the Smithsonian Institution. The traffic the museum generates can mean only good things for West Ridge Mall, which posts sales of $300 per square foot, said Meats. He calculates that traffic will increase at thc mall (which currently receives about 8 million visitors annual- ly) I~y up to 10 percent per year. His logic is that people attending the museum will aisc want to shop or to grab a bite at the mall's fbod court before or after the exhibit. Busloads caf students now visit "Czars" and then shop and eat at thc mall afterward, he said. The museum's man- agement, for its part, sees the partnership SHOPPING CENTERS AND MUSEUMS EACH BRING NEW CUSTOMERS TO THE OTHER. -- Robert "Mac" West principal, Informal Learning Experiences 22 SCT · M~mh 200:{ the same way. "It gives us the opportunity to capture sot'ac people going to thc mall who wouldn't normally come to the exhibit," said Eric [)avis, chairman and COO of Cuhural Exhibitions. Shopping centers offer museums great visibility, with thousands of people becom- ing aware of them just m passing by, said Robert "Mac" West, princ~p~l ot the Washington, D.C.-based Informal Learning Experiences, a consulting firnl to mtlseulns. "There certainly are wondedhl oppor- tunities for shopping centers and cultural organizations to get together," West said, "especially when [the centers have] got empty st(~re~onts." The Bellevue Art Museum was an asset m Bellevue Square, notes Kemper Freeman Jr., the center's owner and a past chairman ot [CSC. The museum, which was housed on the mall's top floor, increased traffic ar the center, which has about [8 million visitors a year, he said. "On the years they were in tune with the market [with their exhibitsl, they were a lot of help," Freeman said. And shopping centers are great places for Inklseunls~ asserts Preenlan, because many mall patrons are people who would probably not venture into areas clustered with art galleries and museums. Conversely, when "Czars" opened at West Rktge, Vicki Hosman, thc mall's mar- keting director, said she saw a prime exam- pie of how the museum helped the center. When dignitaries from the Moscow muse. um that owns the "Czars" collection attended ~ts opening at the mall, they had more on their minds than the exhibit. "While we were going through the museum," Hosman said, "the Russians went shoppu~g." ffi Savage Creatures of Ancient Seas Attraction Responses to Various Inquiries 3/21/03 Is the project the right type of attraction and does it have subject matter that will attract the projected visitation? The Savage Creatures of Ancient Seas is a departure from a traditional "museum" and is more closely aligned with an attraction. The feasibility analysis details four areas, which this facility is "designed by" to assure its current and future viability. These areas Large temporary exhibit gallery and advanced digital large screen theater with access to a substantial movie library bring fresh subjects to the facility as a matter of routine scheduling, · Educational classrooms to electronically as well as conventionally present students with "real time" learning which is sought after by the educational community, · Teaching elements that educate through entertainment such as "reef" climbing walls and a 4D large screen theater which have proven track record for educational quality, · Exhibits that are interactive, which engage visitors. These aspects make this project an attraction for a wide income and age group. This was found through research by leading cable and print networks. The project is one of the first, which purposely and effectively combines education, entertainment and museum elements. Why savage creatures of ancient seas? The subject matter was thoroughly researched and addresses a variety of issues. First is a tie to the heritage of the community and its relationship to the Intracoastal Waterway and Gulf Stream. The attraction will generate interest and activity for fishing and diving in Boynton. Therefore, today's businesses are linked to prehistoric wonders. There exists no focused facility to tell this ever-emerging story. This is not a dying science or niche, to the contrary, as seen the most recent issue of National Geoqraphic (attached), the subject matter has "just been scratched". In fact the article goes on to say that interest has spread to a "new generation" of scientists in computer technologies. NASA has joined in research to analyze the theory of meter impacts on earth and their potential for catastrophic species extinction. The subject matter has produced the largest blockbuster movies of this generation and new movies on the horizon indicate that the interest is sustainable. The subject matter is taught every year to a wide age-group of students from pre-k to graduate studies. The concepts that "museums" are dieing or in "trouble" is a generic statement with little widespread merit. True some facilities are in "trouble", but that statement can be applied to most of life. Instead we see that innovative and dynamic facilities are growing. In fact, shopping centers are now bringing museums into the shopping malls Page 1 of 5 to help sustain and increase foot traffic. If museums were dying, these shopping mall giants would not be bringing them in to die. (See attached article) What about competition in the region? The facility has no direct competition in the region. The other facilities in the region have been contacted and most will be partners for joint marketing programs. The facility's ability to attract from a large area is recognized by the other attractions, Convention and Visitors Bureaus, Chambers of Commerce, curators, universities, County and State representatives. In fact, the project is seen as one of the highlights of the attraction industry for the region and is seen as having the ability to harvest regional, state, national and international visitors. To further define the project as an unique attraction, the large screen theater is an "lwerks" theater. Iwerks presents a better product for entertainment and education than the better-known IMAX. Iwerks is no second-class company and has long ties to Disney. The Boynton facility will have an unique market share, which extends as far as Orlando. The project therefore does not compete with the Fort Lauderdale Science Center or the West Palm Beach Science Center for IMAX content. Because of the proposed funding structure, the attraction has the ability to assessable at a very affordable rate. Analysis indicates it will be one of the best values in the region and will be able to attract a wide range of income levels and age groups. Can the attraction capture the proposed visitation? Locally the Children's Museum has established that people will seek to visit quality sites here in Boynton. The quality of the proposed attraction generates visitation. The project has attracted a New York Times best selling author to become involved in the project. (See attachment) The visitation analysis is detailed in the full study document, however the short point is that the facility has potential well beyond the projected stabilized attendance. The study's capture percentage is 1/3 of what analysis would suggest. This attendance projection is backup by local, regional, state and national facility and attraction performances. The conditional statement is that money for promotion will need to be budgeted. What is the capacity of the facility? The capacity of the facility has several factors. The facility will experience peaking during prime times and days. That level of use will not be seen every day; therefore figuring peak flows for the entire year using the highest day is not valid. Peaking models are readily available and the Boynton Children's Museum usage levels were used to map out peak times. The projected 200,000 visitors are below the maximum peaking for the facility. With peaking management and off peak program development, Page 2 of 5 the museum can handle around the 600,000 visitors per year level. Flow through and peaking is figured by calculating the dwell time at the exhibits (each one is designed for a capture period) and the square footage of the public areas (exhibits, lobbies, food court, store, theater, common areas). The standard for design is 45 square feet per person; the museum has approximately 26,000 sq.ft, of public area, which could support about 575 visitors at any one time. This also can be used to estimate parking needs; parking requirements at absolute peak would be figured as 575 people plus 25 staff for a total of 600 people. The average number of people in a car visiting a facility of this type is 3.75. We will use 3 people to be conservative, which generates a future peak potential need for 200 spaces. (We are looking to provide 600 public spaces in a parking facility tied to the project by trolley service) Is it the right time to be spending money this way? That question is always subjective, however several aspects should be considered when contemplating the issue. The first is that in tough economic times public investment in anchor economic generators is not only sound economics, it could be argued that it is essential for recovery. The development of key anchor attractions benefits the community in over a dozen areas. The attention that Boynton is receiving is, in part, to the vision the city has portrayed to developers, investors and future citizens of a "quality of place". (Most all agree that Boynton being the "best-place-to-live" is good for all.) The question comes down to how to accomplish this goal. Staff has presented the concept that the CRA lead the way for anchor attraction and cultural element development. Developers have purchased and assembled many properties, so assembly, which many times is a CRA focus, for the most part, has been accomplished. TIF revenues for incentives have been created to bring benefit to benchmark projects, but the program also enables the community to invest increment funds for "quality of life" projects. Perhaps the best benefit of projects like the proposed attraction is that it generates economic impacts to the area as a whole. According to a third party economic impact analysis company, the project will generate approximately $20,000,000 in new revenues per year to the area. The projected debt service to be covered solely by TIF funds is $900,000 per year. (The return on annual CRA debt service is a twenty time annual multiplier.) Permanent job creation is 96 jobs. The construction impacts are large $44,538,000 in economic throughput and 293 jobs created. The project is absolutely essential for the attraction of a hotel / conferencing facility to the area. While it may not be the only factor, it most certainly is one of the foremost future room generators for Boynton. Therefore, the project should not be evaluated on the basis of the obsolete concept of by-gone "museums", but instead as an attraction business for the area. The operating budget for the facility is based on a hybrid of entertainment attraction and museum. Attractions are run for-profit and that is the bottom line for this project. The project is designed to be a stand-alone facility in regards to operational costs. In fact, this is one of the new generation facilities that blend its sustaining revenue streams. Page 3 of 5 This three-pronged approach brings flexibility for income generation to minimized economic cycles; i.e., when donation underwriting is down during economic slumps, attractions tend to perform better than the rest of the economy. (Movie attendance and revenues set records this year). In summary, in these economic times it can be argued that investment in projects like the proposed attraction are prudent and in some cases necessary for the local economy. Can we afford the project? The arguments for the project's economics have been made above, however can we afford to build the project? The funding structure for the project comes through a three- point strategy. The funding sources are the CRA, City and County, Grant sources and a capital campaign. The first criteria was to not raise taxes or create a potential for additional tax burden or tax increase. The project's funding strategy clearly covers those issues. The strategy leverages local funds to build the facility, which is the most common format for civic projects. However, to assure success, the local base funding represents approximately 52% of the project.., the normal would be around 10% to 30%. This base funding maximizes the grant and capital campaign funding potential. In fact, discussions directly with major grant sources have generated very favorable responses. We are gearing up to apply for grant funding from one source in the range of $1,500,000 which accounts for 20% of the total funding expected from grant sources. Capital campaign specialists and direct communications indicate that the $5,050,000 goal is well within the project's capability. HOWEVER IT SHOULD BE NOTED THAT IF THE PROJECT DOES NOT SECURE THESE FUNDS, THE PROJECT CAN BE STOPPED. The process to develop the facility is detailed in the project feasibility study and presents several go or no go checkpoints. The real question is can the CRA underwrite the proposed bonds from TIF revenues. Staff has developed a five-year budget forecast to address the funding issue. While nothing is locked in stone, the TIF forecast is 25% below the CRA current track record for expansion for the next two years. The third year is the "moment-of-truth", the project will be ready for funding submission, and bond underwriting. The large-scale projects' impact should be coming online to generate TIF revenues. At that time final project construction decisions or timing can be made. The TIF revenue projections have been adjusted downward for potential Direct Incentive Program impact. The budget also addresses other support projects (garages and infrastructure through Direct Incentive Grants), other districts (Heart of Boynton), events, grants, program content, etc. By the fifth year substantial surpluses are projected. The spreadsheet analysis is attached. The question is that if all things turn negative, is the project worth supporting with TIF revenues? It is a project for the entire community that generates substantial spin-off economics and is of quality and dynamics to be a viable contributor to the heritage and education of the public for years to come. The TIF funds are generated by new Page 4 of 5 development and do not require any additional taxation or new taxation in the future. It allows the CRA to be active in other areas and projects. Page 5 of 5 Aulhor - Teac~r - Sludent Program March 17, 2003 Dear Doug: It was a pleasure speaking with you on Monday. As I mentioned, my name is Steve Alten and I am the author of several NY Times best-selling thrillers. My first series is about carcharodon Megalodon, the fearsome 70-foot prehistoric great white shark. MEG and its sequel, The TRENCH, are also being used as part of the Adopt-An- Author program. About Adopt=An-Author The greatest challenge in America's educational system today is motivating high school students to read. Falling standardized test scores indicate the problem is only getting worse. Perhaps the real challenge is to make reading tim. Adopt-An-Author is an innovative nationwide non-profit program that combines modem-day thrillers teenagers can relate to with an interactive website AND direct contact with the author. This combination has been so successful that the program is now being utilized as part of middle and high school curriculums in over 1,200 schools nationwide, with more classrooms being added every day. The program was profiled on a recent Reading Is Fundamental television special, has received endorsements from educators across the country, including Directors of the School District of Philadelphia and Temple University's Hall of Fame basketball coach, John Chaney, and is supported by both Borders Book. & Music and Barnes & Noble in their annual Teacher Appreciation Days. About the Program: The key to the program's success is that it features novels that appeal to today's high school student. MEG; A Novel of Deep Terror (named the #1 book for reluctant readers by the Young Adult Library Services Association) and its sequel, The TRENCH are best-selling thrillers about carcharodon Megalodon, the fearsome 70-foot prehistoric cousin of the Great White shark. DOMAIN is a doomsday thriller combining the prophecies of the Mayan Calendar with extraterrestrial invasion. GOLIATIt is a submarine adventure that deals with the causes of violence. Amazingly, teachers report that, for many of their students, the novels were the "first the student ever finished on their own." Teachers who register for Adopt-An-Author receive FREE curriculum materials, an action poster for the classroom, and an interactive website (www. SteveAlten. com) where students can take animated tours, complete research, and just have fun. Each student also receives flee monthly newsletters, encouraging them to read and write long atter the classroom experience is over. A new "Writing Tips" link assists those students who want to become novelists. What really distinguishes the AAA program is that it offers direct communication between the author and students via e-mail, conference calls, and school visits. This combination is achieving some amazing results. Teachers report that classroom attendance goes up and disciplinary problems drop during AAA sessions, and student grades peak during the unit. To register and receive free materials for Adopt-An-Author, go to www. AdoptAnAuthor. com Being local (West Palm) means I otten visit many of the Palm Beach & Broward County Schools. Here's what I am willing to do to support your museum: 1. Book sighings. 2. Your museum gift shop can sell my books and posters. (I'11 sign stock) 3. Vito Bertucci owns several sets of Megalodon jaws constructed with real teeth. Vito can be reached at 843-263-6065. Tell him I referred you. 4. We are currently marketing MEG as a movie to Hollywood. The project was originally sold to Hollywood pictures (Disney) in 1996, but two bad screenplays and changes at the studio led to cancellation. We have the fights back and interest from a major producer. 5. The third and best novel of the series, Primal Waters, is slated to be released in Aug./Sept. 2004. We can set-up events with local Borders or Barnes & Noble to coincide with event. 6. I anticipate starting a new novel about the Loch Ness monster in May. 7. The best thing I can assist you with is working with local high schools and middle schools to bring in classes that read MEG. I spoke with Fred Barch, who is in-charge of science teachers in Palm Beach. He will be contacting you with his own ideas. 8. We can link the museum on-line with our reader site at www. SteveAlten. com and our teacher site at www. AdoptAnAuthor.com Feel free to contact me at anytime. Sincerely, ~ Steve Alten, Ed.D. 561-798-0844 e-mail: MEG82159~aol.com Ling T king a bite out of redundant reading and basically it offers Local author comes to North Lauderdale to encourage teens to read. By AMY WARD Steve Alten's science fic- tion thrillers chum with scary prehistoric sharks, artificial intelligence and mystical links to galactic and futuristic realms. But what this Boca Raton author finds thrilling in real life is encouraging teens to read. Students at North Lauderdale Academy High School got a glimpse of that enthusiasm through Alten's Adopt-an-Author program, designed to cap- tivate the imaginations of local teens with sci-fi and author interaction. The academy, located at 7101 Kimberly Blvd., invit- ed Alten to participate in its "Teen Read Week" activi- ties. The week was a part of the national effort to get students to read for fun, as designated by the American Library Association through its Young Adult Library Services Association. Alten said he created the author adoption program due to a surprising amount of feedback he started to get from teen-agers who were reading his books and even from their English teachers. '2 wasn't marketing to teens at all, and the fact that I was getting so much e-mail from teens and the English teachers really shocked me," Alten said. "So I developed a ~roZram teachers who use my books as part of their cur- riculum the opportunity for me to correspond back and forth with their class." Alten said that as a result of that interest, sev- eral schools have integrat- ed his work into their read- ing programs -- simply because it's something the students would actually like to read. "I remember when I had English in 10th or l lth grade, our teacher assigned us books like 'Wuthering Heights' or 'Jane Eyre,' and I just couldn't relate to any of those books and I hated them," he said. '~md I was a kid who loved to read; I j~ust hated the subject matter. With 'Meg,' I've got teach- em who write, I've got liter- ally hundreds of teachers' letters who love the fact that they assign the first three chapters, and the kids come back and they've already read up to the sixth or seventh chapter. That's enthusiasm, so I'm glad to be a part of that." "Meg" was Alten's first book; published in 1997, it's an action tale about a prehistoric great white shark that goes on a mod- em-day rampage. Weston resident Julia Elliott, medial specialist for the academy, said Alten's visit was the culmination of their activities and that the event was a huge success, playing an important part in attracting the students to reading. "I think they were a little taken aback because they had never experienced anything like this," Elliott said. 't4~nd it was an excel- lent experience for them. They have never seen it from the author's perspec- tive like this." AUTHOR INTERACTION: Author Steve Alten talks about his books and shows a shark tooth to students from North Lauderdale Academy High School: (from left), Andre Yapp, Marlene Pierre, Kereen Smith and Jajro Rodriguez. st,ff photo/v.,o.i¢. Co,,~lo 766 students were split into groups that got to spend about an hour with the author, discussing different topics that ranged from Alten's life before he became an author to how to write and get published. North Lauderdale resi- dent Richard Smith, 17, a student at the academy, said he enjoyed meeting with Alten. "The way that he explained his inspirations for the book, and how he went through in detail about how six months before he started writing the book he had nothing, and he had to sell his car to get it published -- it was real inspiring," Smith said. "And it really kind of inspired me to go off and do some stuff of mv own." cian, and Alten's visit to his school reminded him to focus on his own talents. Meghan Ems, 16, also participated in the event and said Alten's books have encouraged her to read. "They're interesting to read; I don't even know how to put it," Ems said. "It's a thriller, but since I love animals and it's about sharks and dinosaurs and prehistoric animals, it kind of hooks me into the book." Alten said that once teachers register w/th his program, they can down- load the curriculum mate- rials for free from his Web site. He said he likes to interact with all of his read- ers, and if he can help per- suade teenagers to read more, it's .very gratifying. "It m rmxm rrt~n e, ue to read or in other walks of life, I think it's impor- tant,' he said. "Several of them are wannabe writers, and a couple of them showed me some poetry they had written or e- mailed me some of their work. Anything I can do to help them, I try to do it. It's all part of the program, to give back." For more information on Alten's Adopt-an-Author program, visit www. ste- vealten.com. The site features a spe- cial student/teacher link for more information. For more information about North Lauderdale Academy High School, call (954) 720-0299. . Students At George Washington Carver High School Meet Meg's Author Steve Alten Copyrighl .lumes (;. Slmd.s. 2t~2 I.alcxi I.awsou sils ia Ibc cipha chilling, lIe is talkiag ablml Ibc n.xel Mce. ;\ IL'w ~seeks earlier he prepared a summary of Ihe h~ok for his 15~glish/('re:~live Writing Course al Generic Waxhinglon Carver l ligh Scl,~ol in Norlh I'hih~dclphi:l. ugai.st d~c edge el' the clil'l~ of Wakilaku's Sunscl Beach, washiu~ uP I~ny cm~- laCOllllS [Jlld debris lhal IJllcrgd Ihe sllorg. There was Jill Llnc;inlly I~elin~ iu lJlc air. ~ixlC~ll )'~ar old Josh Clll'lis aud bis bgsl fl'lead Kevia Tholnas were ~illJll~ on IJl~ cliffs uf ~VahLllu Bay. ill ils soulherll couslal FhlsJll'orward. I}1c atllhor. Sieve AJIcii is slalltlill~ in I?Olll el' Ille class sharing with sludcnts thc joys or reading and writing books. They lislcn atlcntivcly and limos ~tsk him qucslhms Ihat hc dkl not ex,cl. After class, several sludcnls galhcr Io oJ'J~r a post aaalysis el'Alien's speech acls. 12lb grader Adriau CharJcs ~uins thc ym~ waul to mad Iht ucxt page. Then you want Io road the whole'book. You'll rc~d froltl beginning Io the end." I.,alcxi Lawsoll lolls what he found most ap~aling ahoul Ibc book. FIc could dcscrihc Iht shark and umkc you believe that il was Sieve Alton at George Washington Car'ver Iligh School I'holo hy l,eandre .lacksml alive. That was good." Moving to Ibc ccnler of Ibc speech conllllunhv is Stephanic Palicki: "It xw~s exciting. Il kept me goiug. I didn't wahl to put the I}ook down once I sial'lCd. It's a continuous page turner compared to the edger books I've mad for school. It was jusl an awesome book. Il was l~r English. Sncial Science alld Science. J du soulc research online bul I go lo the public library also." Continuing lo discass Iht book. Adrian Charles told why he ~vas inlprcsscd wilh thc amount of researcl~ Ibc author did. 5horlly aflcr lilt 12:30 p.m.. Charles nolcs. "1 jnsl like :dl ~l~c research. Thal was m5 f'axo~itc part. I also did some research in prcpm-ing my p,pcr mi this hook. WC had I(* map out where thc Meg Iravclcd . All artmml thc PacilSc. We als() h;Id hi do research fi~r science class, like ah. researching thc shark." Janicna ChieFS file speech cipJlll on Iho Olio filial lXtO: "J .jusl loved lilt hook. I IJlOLl~hl thc Will*lc im[jcct was nice J~CCatlSO J'lll IHII ii I'Ctldcr al all. Fill' IllC Jo bO hllcrcslcd in the book. il had lo be rcally good. The firsl c.uplc of chapters were long but when it camo 1. lhc Shark Allack. I just kepi on rcadiug il. XVIliIc Veil read- ing linc hook you arc Ir5 lng lo )oil al IJlc j)Cl'SOll like. 'move il.' ]glling I(im to got out of Iht xsaler.." PJatufina adds. "Thc Meg was intcrcstinu, h didn'l b~u'e me al all Olhcr books arc ab(mt Ihiu~s Ihal do ilol inlcrcsl mc al ;l~. Author Slex e Allen Talks Wilb Shnlenls Already II~g George Washinglon Carver I ligh Sch~ol wrilcrs/crilk's cux'ision Meg on thc big screen. Slcphanic. "1 want Itl sec lilt I~'m;llc Mc~ allllck Ibc male." Stlrliug Lip. Latcvi:l s;~vs. "Aud Iht pm'l when hc goos in his slolll~cll." Conllucntin~ (Hi lilt joy of haviag ~'lcg's author visil his . Lalcvi Illl-IIs Ii'om Ihc book m discuss ils mflh{~r,"l lo was.trivial. I Ihmlghl he'd bc serious." S~cph:mic .joins in." I fl~oughl Iohl tis his hackgroulld. Jlo~v Ilo ~l'CW up and cvcr~lJlJn~, I Ic (h;tred x~ ilh tls his ( 'urt'cr (;mils cslctl ill anilllills. I only i'ccculJv bce;nile Jnlercslcd in tlnderwalcr anill~;lls [(i Ihal's years. I slarlcd pal~icipaling in Iht Univcrsily iff I'mmsylvania's Brain Bce. h's sim- Jhlr Io lilt ~pclJJllg BcR bul Juslcad )'JJtl Sll'JVC Io answer qllCSlJon ~bOLll IJlc hl'ain J'llllCti~nl, paris alld ev0rylhJn~. J w~m Ihe Brain BR~ Iwjcc. I ~o lo lJl~ ~i l )llals BaJJi111111'R. Thal is wJlRl'0 J I11ccl ~raill ~c~ SCJloJa[s [rom across IhR c(llllllrV or whaJ- over. They Jlavc s~ssions ou Alzhcimcr. J~m'kJnson and cvc~lhiug. I ~o~ld like Sltldy N~tlrostu-~0Fy ;il IJ1¢ UuivcrsJlv of PCllnsvJvania. JPcnll rceruilcrs ~Rl~hi ll~ km)ckin~ down Ihis George Washi~lon (';irv~r fii~h Sclnml Jbr J~n~JnL'crJll~ alld Science door J." ' ' ' .Janicna: "J wanl 1o bca CJlclnislry I~nginccr. I alw~lys wmllml ,~ do t[JJ[cr¢llJ. Everybody aJwHy~/Vallled [o hca doc. Jr or illll'SC lit Jliw~cl. J h;ivc liked Malh. i'll1 a sophoulllr0 now htll I dou'l know ~hal college ['11 g~ m." J.alc( i "J pi:ill Iii Ilc all archilccl alld i'd like I~ ~o [() J~L'nll ~I;IIR. J know J c~111 do buJJtJ[n~s and J'nl i'caJ ~ood al Malh. 1 pm~icipalcd in IhJs a[Icr sch(~JJ progrum x~hcrc you Io dCsiga a oily. I designed Ihe shoppiug Ceuler. ~e Cily I cnvishm is (mc where eye.body kn/)ws each olher. "He pass0s the Mic lo Adrian ~ho laJks ;d~ou~ illlagina~ city as bRin,~ o11¢ "WJlRrc eye.body is happy. Jl~lvhl~ lJlcir OWl1 with no problems or v~olence." Smden~ At G~rge ~V~lfin~on Stcphanie says her imuginary wodd is ouc in which ~oplc are happy, having their own dfing and Finally. I'icrrckc explains: "I'm last lircd of seeing ~coplc and friends Ihal juM dou't waut to do nolhing ~ and not go ~g to school. I try to lalk to Ihcm all Iht j time nd hey just say, '1 know I can never make iL' j S udc ~ s Gcorge Washingtou Carver ttlgh School j s ~ u'c Ibc optimism of Mr. Carver who s~nt his IH~ [ bo' ~ the odds T~cy c~vson a world t~yond e/ one they now inhahil. Adrian Charles sums ~1 up fellow Curver students: "1 say tu ull Ihe Iccnagers like us. you can do anylhing you want lo do as long as you sot your mind Io il. Slay Ibcuscd and determined and you will achieve your dreams." One of the teachers, Marlcuc stutcs, "[ Ihought Ihat Sieve was good. The studcuts were iutcrcs~cd iu how he achieved success. I think il was a wondcrl'uJ opportunity for lhe kids lo meet an author. A hH el' Ihings Ihey road arc by aulbors who arc dead or Ihc uu[hors aFC so I'ar removed. Jt was nice to sec author in the classrooms" Another English Teacher. D~b~i~_~_joins in: "The chullenge is that many high school students only want to read lhings fl~ey are esled in reading. Adults are Ihe same. Meg was a won- defful opportunity because it was ~th educational and j in,cresting. It's a fast read. It's a page lumcr and Mr. Alton does get into a lot of scientific jargon Ihat appeals to our students who are in a school whore Ihmst is science and malhenlatJcs. Some of Ihe kkls told me Ihat lhcy read thc b~k iu ouc night." Marlene concludes." I Ihiuk Steve Alien's Meg was really excitiug. It definilely became a page lumer Iowards Iht cud. Yo~ wanled to see how it would come to some kind of conclusion. One of Ihings about Meg is Ihat it wa~ very visual and tl~e kid~ ?: , .just loved Ihat." l)cbb~e joins in: "1 Ihi~k tl~e kid~ ' could relate lo it because a Iol of the incidcnl~ in Iht novel involved kids. Kids in Ihc walcr. Kids surlh~g, And suddenly they're being altackcd by Ihe ~hark. Back in the day when dim}saurs wore ~al-ds and wc were in school there wasn't die inlerncl or VCR. You had television, football, radio and homework. There wa~n'[ file aHFacliOl] o[ clcclronic illcdJa. Thoro wcrc pasl time. Now nmsl kid~ consider it a burden. They say. "J can gO onJJllC aud IJlcy dOll'l consider readiug although tirol is whal Ihcy are doing. Wc hax c a u{~x~cJ of 1110 i~lOlllh rcquhcd reading. Tha~ }~ [~;ll'[ el Ahcn's visit Io (;cra'go \\'ashinglnu Carxcr I ligh PRIMAL WATERS Book 3 in the MEG series Eighteen years have passed since Angel broke free of the Tanaka Lagoon and returned to the Mariana Trench. Meanwhile, Jonas Taylor-adventurer, has become Jonas Taylor, middle-aged father of two, overwhelmed by mountains of bills and the daily strife of raising a family. But life is about to change. A Hollywood television producer wants 3onas to join his new survival series: DAREDEVTLS. For the next six weeks, two teams of crazy daredevils on a South Pacific ocean voyage on-board a replica of a Spanish Galleon will try to outperform one another in front of the cameras. 3onas needs the money, and the job seems easy enough - doing color commentary. But behind the scenes, someone else is pulling the strings. And before it's over, Jonas, Terry, and Mac will again come face to face with the most dangerous creatures ever to stalk the Earth. http://www.stevealten.com/primal_waters.htm 3/18/2003 [~Close Window To Go Back To Steve Alten Main Page[] Prehistoric Battle Scene Storyline: On a top-secret dive into the Pacific Ocean's deepest canyon, Jonas Taylor found himself face-to- face with the largest and most ferocious predator in the history of the animal kingdom. The sole survivor of the mission, Taylor is haunted by what he's sure he saw but still can't prove exists - Carcharodon megalodon, the massive mother of the great white shark. The average prehistoric IVleg weighs in at twenty tons and could tear apart a Tyrannosaurus rex in seconds. Written off as a crackpot suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, Taylor refuses to forget the depths that nearly cost him his life. With a Ph.D. in paleontology under his belt, Taylor spends years theorizing, lecturing, and writing about the possibility that Meg still feeds at the deepest levels of the sea. But it takes an old friend in need to get him to return to the water, and a hotshot female submarine pilot to dare him back into a high-tech miniature sub. Diving deeper than he ever has before, Taylor will face terror like he's never imagined, and what he finds could turn the tides bloody red until the end of time. MEG is about to surface. When she does, nothing and no one is going to be safe, and 3onas must face his greatest fear once again. http://www, stevealten.com/Meg/home.htm 3/18/2003 http://www, stevealten.com/Trench/tour.htm 3/18/2003 http ://www. stevealten.com/Images/freeimg_OO4.htm 3/18/2003 http://www, stevealten.com/Images/fi-eeimg_OO8.htm 3/18/2003 http://www, stevealten.eom/image 1 .htm 3/18/2003 http://www, stevealten, com/image2.htm 3/18/2003 Overview MEG; A Novel of Deep Terror (Bantam/Doubleday 1997), its sequel, The TRENCH (Kensington/Pinnacle 2000) and the soon-to-be released PRIMAL WATERS (Summer 2003) are novels featuring the most terrifying creature ever to have existed: Carcharodon Megalodon the 70-foot, 70,000 pound predecessor of the Great White Shark. "Two words: Jurassic Shark"--Los Angeles Times The popularity of the MEG series is International. Besides hitting every domestic best-seller list, including the N.Y. Times (#7 audio, #19 hardback) the book was sold for record amounts in 13 countries, and was the Book of the Frankfurt Book Fair when it made its debut in 1996. MEG was reported on Best-Seller lists in England, France, and Germany, and is still a featured radio program in Japan. More... http://www.stevealten.com d by Back A recent summer 2002 MEG MOVIE petition was signed by over 65,000 fans in over 20 countries in only 60 days (see PETITION). The TRENCH (::[999) the sequel to MEG, was also a N.Y. Times best-seller and was sold in another dozen countries, including England, France, Germany, The Netherlands, and Korea. And debuting this summer in hardback will be PRIMAL WATERS, the highly awaited third part of the MEG series. The only question now is: WHICH STUDIO WILL OWN THIS BILLION DOLLAR FRANCHISE? Back http://www, stevealten.com/overview.htm 3/18/2003