英语听力：恐龙是怎样炼成的—16

With his miniature model of an adult T-rex for reference, along with the growing patterns of close relatives of tyrannosaurs, it's possible to work out the likely proportions of the baby. The starting point for the sculpture is a simple illustration.

-So, let's start up. T-rex usually an adult, its skull is a great weight to measure because it's so big. But in babies, the skull’s gonna be thinner. The rule is always that the orbit is gonna be larger. Also when you look at human babies, we notice they're about three heads tall, whereas in an adult human which is anywhere from seven to nine depending on how tall they are.

-Do you find yourself as you’re looking at other people's reconstructions and thinking, “oh god, they’ve got that wrong”?

-Yes. There are a bunch of people who are out there, who were coming from maybe film or special effects or something like that. They are doing this kind of work from a lesson-formed background. So I'm very privileged to work with a scientist. And that's definitely an asset that I don't dare forget.

-He is looking nice, this little T-rex.

But with limited fossil remains, the reconstruction has room for creative license.

-Can you draw me another baby T-rex based on the same evidence but taking it off from a bit of a different direction?

-Sure. Let's do the same thing. We have a head. There’s a lot of evidence that some of them might have feathers, and that maybe some of them, when they were young, would have had some sort of downy covering that would have left in adulthood so that it would have been shed before they were fully grown.

-This little baby is looking extraordinarily bird-like. It has really long legs. Is this a reasonableinterpretation?

-There is nothing that says that it can't be this way.

-Right. They are fantastic. The same creature but they are very different. Even without the feathers here, the length of the legs is quite extraordinary in this one. And I love the feathers. I mean that just immediately makes it look like a completely different creature. It shows you that there’s quite a bit of room for artistic maneuver, I think, in these reconstructions.

-Yes. Definitely. Definitely.