NEWSWEEK: What do you think about the “Jurassic Park” movies?

Rodolfo Coria: I haven’t seen the new one yet, but I really liked the first two because I like science fiction, dinosaur movies and Spielberg. But people have to be very aware that watching these movies is not a way to learn about dinosaurs. It’s just entertainment.

How close does Hollywood come in depicting the world of dinosaurs?

In terms of movement, shape of the body, the volume of the muscles, and how fast some dinosaurs could run, that is accurate. They are showing what we know about them now. In the current film, one of the major plot points revolves around the communication skills of raptors. How real is that? I think that is going very, very ahead of our knowledge. We do know that the closest relatives to dinosaurs are birds. Birds are actually meat-eating dinosaurs. And we know that birds communicate with each other. They have a vocalization all their own. They can “shoot” answers from their relatives. So it could be possible that dinosaurs did the same thing. We don’t have the evidence. But it’s possible, and it’s really fun.

The raptors in this movie are given almost humanlike intelligence. How brainy were dinosaurs?

We know that Troodontids, one of the last groups of meat-eating dinosaurs before extinction, had a very large brain, larger than any other dinosaur. Their brain was also larger than any other mammal that lived at that time. A North American paleontologist named Dale Russell proposed about 20 years ago that if the extinction of the dinosaurs hadn’t come about, this group of dinosaurs could have kept developing, enlarging their brains and could have become smarter than other dinosaurs.

Why is there such a fascination with dinosaurs?

That’s very interesting, because I didn’t have this fascination when I was a kid. I just became a scientist because of a slow evolution from biology in general to fossil fauna and then to extinct fauna and then to dinosaurs. When I started to study dinosaurs, I discovered it was something I liked to do, but I didn’t feel this magic fascination. I think this fascination is a typical American cultural phenomenon. It doesn’t happen in any other country, in my opinion. Kids and teenagers, at some point, are the center of this fascination. Grown people aren’t really interested in dinosaurs, but they were when they were kids. This local fascination started when the first dinosaur exhibit was put together in the early 1800s in New York and supported by the American Museum of Natural History. It was a hit, and then several other museums in the states became interested in dinosaurs and began to build their own exhibits. This didn’t happen in Argentina. The only dinosaur exhibit for many years in Argentina was at La Plata Museum.

That seems odd, given how much fossil work goes on in Argentina.

I think in Argentina, a new generation of paleontologists started to work very hard in the last 10 to 15 years. To that point, there was only one person researching dinosaurs, Dr. Jose Bonaparte, who was my teacher. He was surrounded by a gang of students-which was us-and all of us are active paleontologists who grew up under the shadow of Bonaparte. I think that’s why Argentina has taken this frontline place [in dinosaur research]. It’s not because Argentina suddenly became a very rich area of dinosaurs. Argentina suddenly became a very rich area of paleontologists.

But what about the peculiarity of the size of the fossils uncovered in Argentina?

Some facts are showing some peculiarities in the South American fauna, and we are talking about Argentina, the Neuquen Province of Patagonia. It’s easier to find dinosaur fossils in Patagonia because of the dry weather and lack of huge vegetation. The question of why they were so big-I don’t have an answer. In every ecosystem, the plant eaters are always larger than the meat eaters, always. Still, the size of these guys is completely out of scale. This size was never repeated again in the whole evolution.

The “Jurassic Park” movies all depict a dinosaur world where the animals move in herds. How much scientific evidence of that is known?

We do know about the social behavior of plant eaters because of the very good footprint sites in North America. The long-necked dinosaurs used to move in herds because the footprints of these herds. We recently discovered a nesting site in Patagonia that confirms that the sauropod laid eggs. Before that, we were not sure. But we found extensive nesting areas with millions of eggs with embryos inside. Raptor eggs also play a prominent role in the new movie.

Raptors are a different problem. We don’t have any record of raptor eggs. We know velociraptors, the small version of the ones in the movies, laid eggs. We found what we call a mega-raptor in Patagonia, about 20 feet long with almost a foot-long claw that could be comparable to the ones in the movie. These guys were very, very fast, very sophisticated running animals who could jump. Movie paleontologists seem to favor the Indiana Jones fedora. What’s the favored headgear on a real dig?

[Laughs] You know what? Give me sponsorship, and I’ll use any kind of hat. Give me Nike sponsorship, and I’ll wear a Nike hat. I have seen the Indiana Jones hat on sites, but I don’t know which came first.