From the Publisher

By Elizabeth Valk Long

Andrea Dorfman remembers viewing Tyrannosaurus rex in New York City's American Museum of Natural History as a grade schooler, and, like millions of her peers, being "mesmerized. How could you not be captivated by those huge teeth?" she asks.

She returned to the museum hundreds of times, as an intern at Natural History magazine, as a journalist and as a happy gawker, and the exhibit never changed -- the same impressive dentition.

On her most recent visit, however, interviewing paleontologists Mark Norell and Michael Novacek for this week's cover story, the dinosaur halls were closed -- and for the very reason, she notes with some satisfaction, that drove our story. "They're being overhauled to reflect all the new information in the field."

That Dorfman was convinced the story was valid and not just a product of recurrent dinomania or the buzz surrounding the upcoming release of Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park came as a relief to her colleagues. In her capacity as TIME's head science researcher, she has sent many an overhyped nonstory to extinction. "Andrea serves as a kind of litmus test," says senior editor Claudia Wallis, who first suggested the time might be ripe for a reappraisal of dinosaurs. "She's constitutionally incapable of exaggeration." Adds another editor, Charles Alexander: "She has a scientist's skepticism."

As with most good scientists and journalists, the skepticism is balanced by an enthusiast's energy. The head researcher position is a full-time job, but Dorfman is also one of the section's more prolific reporters. A biology major at Yale, where she was also science editor of the Yale Daily News, she has covered everything from the Neolithic Iceman found in an Alpine glacier to the Exxon Valdez oil spill to genetic engineering. She was also one of the organizing hands behind TIME's intensive treatment of the 1992 Earth Summit. Still, Dorfman, who keeps a small collection of fossils herself, has a fondness for things that come out of the past to enlighten the present. Without old bones, Dorfman points out, we wouldn't have realized that "every time you order chicken for dinner, you're actually ordering dinosaur."