It stood ten feet high, weighed over eight hundred pounds, and had a beak that could tear the head off pretty much anything that irked it. Its family survived in formidable fashion for fifty million years, yet until a skeleton was discovered in Florida in 1963, we had no idea that it had ever existed.
它身高3米，体重350千克以上，它的喙能把差不多任何令它讨厌的动物的脑袋扯掉。它的家族横行霸道地存在了5000万年。然而，l963年在美国佛罗里达州发现一副骨骼之前。我们压根儿不知道它存在过。
Which brings us to another reason for our uncertainty about extinctions: the paltriness of the fossil record. We have touched already on the unlikelihood of any set of bones becoming fossilized, but the record is actually worse than you might think. Consider dinosaurs. Museums give the impression that we have a global abundance of dinosaur fossils. In fact, overwhelmingly museum displays are artificial.
这就引出了我们对灭绝原因缺少把握的另一个原因：贫乏的化石记录。我们已经简单谈到任何一副骨骼变成化石的不可能性，但这类记录的贫乏程度比你想像的还要严重。以恐龙为例。实际上，绝大部分的博物馆展品都是人造的。

The giant Diplodocus that dominates the entrance hall of the Natural History Museum in London and has delighted and informed generations of visitors is made of plaster — built in 1903 in Pittsburgh and presented to the museum by Andrew Carnegie. The entrance hall of the American Museum of Natural History in New York is dominated by an even grander tableau: a skeleton of a large Barosaurus defending her baby from attack by a darting and toothy Allosaurus. It is a wonderfully impressive display — the Barosaurus rises perhaps thirty feet toward the high ceiling — but also entirely fake. Every one of the several hundred bones in the display is a cast. Visit almost any large natural history museum in the world — in Paris, Vienna, Frankfurt, Buenos Aires, Mexico City — and what will greet you are antique models, not ancient bones.
显赫地放在伦敦自然史博物馆入口处的、为几代游客带来快乐和增长知识的巨大梁龙，完全是用塑料做的——该模型1903年在匹兹堡建成，由安德鲁·卡内基赠送给该博物馆。纽约的美国自然史博物馆的门厅里有个更加气势宏大的场面：一副巨大的巴罗龙骨骼，在保护自己的幼崽不受一头正张牙舞爪扑过来的异龙的伤害。这是一件令人印象深刻的展品——巴罗龙朝着高高的天花板伸到也许9米的高度——但也完全是赝品。展出的几百根骨头根根都是模型。要是你参观世界上的几乎任何自然史博物馆——巴黎的、维也纳的、法兰克福的、布宜诺斯艾利斯的，还是墨西哥城的——你看到的都是古老的模型，而不是古老的骨头。