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Technology obliterates the Amazon mystique

-- Pratap Ravindran

TECHNOLOGY may have a lot going for it -- but it sure takes the romance out of living.

Take the Amazon river, by way of an example. Generations of fiction writers have held millions in thrall with their accounts of attempts to pin-point the source of this mighty river. And now a 22-member, five-nation expedition representing the United Sta tes of America, Poland, Peru, Canada and Spain, has done just that -- identified the source of the Amazon -- with advanced satellite navigation technology.

According to the National Geographic Society, the expedition, headed by Andrew Pietowski, a mathematics teacher from Carmel (New York), used Global Positioning System (GPS) equipment to identify the souce of one of the world's longest rivers as a stream beginning on Nevado Mismi, a 18,363-foot-high mountain in southern Peru.

GPS receivers use orbiting satellites as reference points to home in on locations on the Earth's surface.

``The source of the Amazon can be defined as the most distant point in the drainage basin from which surface water runs year-round, or the furthest point from which water could possibly flow to the Atlantic,'' according to Andrew Johnston, a geographer o f the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum who handled the GPS. ``The Nevado Mismi fits both these definitions.''

The expedition is reported to have travelled by foot, Jeep, bicycle and horseback to explore the five Andean rivers that come together to form the Amazon -- the Apurimac, Huallaga, Mantaro, Maranion and Urumba-Vilcanota.

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STRANGE as it may seem, Michael Crichton, best-selling author of Jurassic Park and Lost World and film director and producer, has never been awarded the Oscar. But that probably doesn't bother him with Dong Zhiming, China's most celebrated dinosaur speci alist, naming a new species of dinosaur after him.

Don Zhiming, lead researcher at Beijing's Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, is reported to have said that he had chosen to honour Crichton because of the huge popularity of the latter's works in China.

The 58-year-old celebrity author whose most recent book, Timeline, has topped paperback bestseller lists and the movie rights to which has been sold for 15 per cent of the eventual gross, is quoted as having said: ``Believe me, when I was a kid staring u p at those huge skeletons in the museum, I never imagined that one would be named for me.''

Crichton's ankylosaur, as the species is now called, is an early member of a small, plant-eating dinosaur which lived about 180 million years ago in the early Jurassic Age. Scientists have, so far, found only the creature's head, but they believe that i t had bony ridges running along its back which evolved into the armored plates that characterised ankylosaurs in their prime, some 60 million years later in the middle of the Cretaceous period. By this time, ankylosaurs went around on all fours, keeping away predators with their bone-clubbed tails.

The dinosaur was discovered in the fossil-rich Lufeng Basin of southern China.