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New Dinosaur Species
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Parents hesitant about NRA armed schools proposal
By | Associated Press – 9 hrs ago
- Associated Press/Noah Berger, File - FILE - In this Dec. 17, 2012 photo, Officer Rick Moore of the Oakland school district police patrols Oakland Technical High School in Oakland, Calif. The National Rifle
MIAMI (AP) — The nation's largest gun-rights lobby called Friday for the placement of an armed police officer in every school, but parents and educators questioned how safe such a move would keep kids, whether it would be economically feasible and how it would alter student life. Their reactions ranged from supportive to disgusted.
Already, there are an estimated 10,000 sworn officers serving in schools around the country, most of them armed and employed by local police departments, according to a membership association for the officers. Still, they're deployed at only a fraction of the country's approximately 98,000 public schools, and their numbers have declined during the economic downturn. Some departments have increased police presence at schools since last week's shooting rampage at a Connecticut elementary school that left 26 dead, but say they can only do so temporarily because of funding.
The National Rifle Association said at a news conference that it wants Congress to fund armed officers in every American school, breaking its silence on the Connecticut shootings. The idea made sense to some anxious parents and teachers, but provoked outright anger in others.
"Their solution to resolve the issue around guns is to put more guns in the equation?" said Superintendent Hank Grishman of the Jericho, N.Y., schools on Long Island, who has been an educator for 44 years. "If anything it would be less safe for kids. You would be putting them in the midst of potentially more gunfire."
Where school resource officers are already in place, they help foster connections between the schools and police, and often develop a close enough relationship with parents and children that they feel comfortable coming forward with information that could prevent a threat, said Mo Canady, executive director of the National Association of School Resource Officers.
But an Oklahoma educator who teaches at a school with armed officers described the NRA's proposal as a "false solution," though she's not opposed to the presence of more police.
"I teach at a school that has four armed police officers on campus every day, but it's more than a quarter of a mile from the main office to my room, and I'm not even the farthest room away," said Elise Robillard, a French teacher at Westmoore High School. "If (a student) put a loaded gun in their bag and came to my classroom and pulled it out and started shooting, by the time the police officerfigured out what was going on and got to my classroom, we'd all be dead. This whole hallway could be dead before a policeman got here."
Around the country, school systems sometimes rotate armed officers through schools or supplement them with unarmed safety agents. New York City's school district is the largest in the country with more than 1 million students. The NYPD has 350 armed officers who rotate throughout the school system, and they're supplemented by unarmed safety personnel who also report to the department. In Philadelphia, school officials have rejected armed patrols in city schools and instead use unarmed school police.
New Dinosaur Species
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Enlarge PhotoThis is a Heterodontosaurus flesh …
Enlarge PhotoThis shows the new dinosaur dwarf …
A bizarre dinosaur had vampire-like fangs, a parrot beak and porcupine bristles, researchers say.
The ancient creature, which was found 50 years ago in southern Africa but drew relatively little attention until now, may shed light on the evolution of the major group of dinosaurs that included famous giants such as Stegosaurus and Triceratops.The 200-million-year-old dinosaur "was two-legged, probably fleet-footed, and had grasping hands," said researcher Paul Sereno, a paleontologist at the University of Chicago.
Named Pegomastax africanus, or "thick jaw from Africa," it was less than 2 feet (0.6 meters) long and weighed less than a house cat at 15 pounds (6.8 kilograms) at most, "and was mostly tail and neck," Sereno added.
Strangely, bristles somewhat like porcupine quills may have spread across most of the body of Pegomastax. Such bristles first appeared in a relative named Tianyulong recently discovered in China. Buried in lake sediments and covered by volcanic ash, Tianyulong was preserved with hundreds of bristles covering its body from its neck to the tip of its tail. [Paleo-Art: Stunning Illustrations of Dinosaurs]
"It would have looked a bit like a two-legged porcupine, covered in these weird, funky, quill-like things," Sereno said of Pegomastax. "The bristles were not quite as strong as a porcupine's, and they don't look as if they were especially effective for insulation. Perhaps they had colors and helped differentiate species, or made Pegomastaxlook bigger than it actually was to potential predators."
Extending from its parrot-beaked skull, which was less than 2 inches (5 centimeters) long, were serrated canines a half-inch (0.8 cm) long from both its upper and lower jaws.
"It would have looked like Dracula," Sereno told LiveScience. "Probably appropriate, since we're now moving toward Halloween."
The dinosaur was originally chipped out of red rock near the border of Lesotho and South Africa by Harvard researchers in the 1960s. Sereno recently came across it while going through Harvard archives.
"I was just amazed," Sereno recalled.
Although the long stabbing fangs might hint that Pegomastax was a predator, its parrotlike beak instead suggests it ate seeds and nuts, or maybe plucked fruit. When the jaws closed, the fangs slid into sockets in the opposing jaws instead of sliding past one another for the optimized cutting or gripping expected of a carnivore.
"The canines probably had nothing to do with meat-eating," Sereno said. "They may have been used to spite rivals, nip at others, defend themselves, maybe root around for food."
Tall teeth in the back of the jaw probably helped slice plants, with surfaces that slid past one another when the jaws closed, operating like self-sharpening scissors. "Pegomastax and kin were the most advanced plant-eaters of their day," Sereno said.
Pegomastax belonged to one of two major divisions of dinosaurs, the "bird-hipped" ornithischians, which included armored ankylosaurs, bony-plated stegosaurs, duck-billed hadrosaurs and horned, frilled ceratopsians such as Triceratops. Ironically, birds themselves belong to the other major group of dinosaurs, the "lizard-hipped" saurischians, which included the carnivorous theropods such as Tyrannosaurusand the long-necked herbivorous sauropods such as Diplodocus.
When Pegomastax was alive, the supercontinent Pangaea had just begun to split into northern and southern land masses. Pegomastax appears to lie near the base of the family tree of the ornithischians, and as such could shed light on the evolution of this major group, Sereno said.
The scientists detailed their findings online today (Oct. 3) in the journal ZooKeys and on the website of the National Geographic Society.
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