Billy White, age 10, of Indianapolis, Indiana, for his question:

Who was the king of the dinosaurs?

In the days of the dinosaurs, everything went by the law of the jungle. It was everyone for himself and the mightiest fighter was the winner. In this case, we might say that the king of the dinosaurs was the mightiest and most fearsome killer of them all. At any rate, this is what the scientists must have thought when they named him Tyrannosaurus Rex, which means "the tyrant lizard king."

Our modern elephant has a big brain to match his bulky body and so do our giant whales. Though none of the dinosaurs were as big as our big blue whale, many of them were much bigger than elephants. So one would expect them to have sizeable brains to match their huge bodies. But this was not so. Those monstrous reptiles had very, very small brains, which means that complicated ideas were too much. for them.

One of our most complicated ideas is sharing, the give and take of living peaceably together with groups of other persons. Human civiliza¬tion is the story of social groups, nations and kingdoms. But such ideas were much too much for the bitsy brain of a dinosaur. Every dinosaur was on his own, hunting or hunted by all the others.

Certainly they did not recognize a certain dinosaur as their king, though no doubt they feared the mightiest killer. Actually, for reasons unknown, the last of the huge reptiles died out some sixty million years ago. Scientists have to piece their story together from the fossilized bones they left in the ground. During the past century or so, as differ¬ent types were unearthed, they were given modern scientific names.

The word "dinosaur" itself means "terrible lizard." They were, of course, a lizard branch of the cold blooded reptile clan. And because they were enormously big, they seemed terrible. Besides, some had fearsome meat eating teeth and others wore fearsome armor. Their modern scientific names include stegosaurus", "brontosaurus" and "plesiosaur." Each fancy name tells something about its long gone owner.

This naming system was fine for the average dinosaurs. But one of them obviously was something special. He walked on two hind legs like tree trunks and stood twenty feet tall. Including his mighty tail, he was 50 feet long. His huge head measured four feet long and his enormous jaws were crammed with six inch, dagger sharp teeth. His total weight was up to ten tons, which is heavier than two Indian elephants.

Without a doubt, this dinosaur was the biggest, mightiest and most terrifying meat eating animal that ever walked on the planet Earth. It seemed logical to call him the king of the dinosaurs, for no animal on earth could prevail against him. So his scientific name is Tyrannosaurus Rex    the tyrant lizard king.

This mightiest of the mighty lizards lived during the Cretaceous period of earth's past, about 100 million years ago. This was toward the end of the long dinosaur history story. The climate was mild and moist and a few reptiles took to the air. As the young Rocky Mountains grew, North America was populated with a vast variety of huge fantastic reptiles which were hunted without mercy by the so called king of the dinosaurs.