Predator

A fierce prehistoric seagoing creature - an animal so bizarre it was dubbed "Godzilla" by scientists who found it - has been unearthed in a fossil-rich Argentine desert at the foot of the Andes. Between 12 and 15 feet long, with a bullet-shaped head like a meat-eating dinosaur, relatively few teeth, flippers instead of legs and a fishlike tail, it is considered a crocodyliform, the term for crocodiles and their extinct relatives. But the features of this animal, described online yesterday by the journal Science, are drastically different from other crocodyliforms, which had long, slender snouts and toothy jaws.

Every year on the second Saturday in September, East Berlin, Pa., takes a giant step back in time. The sleepy town's main street is transformed into a Colonial village square. By 8 a.m., the space brims with potters and weavers, carpenters, quilters, candlemakers and even a blacksmith. Women wearing ankle-length skirts and aprons and men attired in old-fashioned breeches and straw hats command each booth, practicing their arts and selling their wares. Colonial Day is East Berlin's annual return to its roots.

This time a year ago I was kayaking alongside reefs of native bay oysters in Virginia's Lynnhaven Inlet, near where the Chesapeake meets the Atlantic. "Lynnhavens" once were known throughout the oyster-eating world, prized by gourmets, slurped by presidents and allegedly served on the Titanic and other luxury liners. But there was scarcely a live oyster to be found there by the mid-1990s, when Rob Brumbaugh, a Chesapeake Bay Foundation scientist, would take kids there for environmental education.

In the aftermath of highly publicized cases of child murders by registered sex offenders, Maryland Attorney General J. Joseph Curran Jr. said yesterday that he will push for legislation requiring lifetime supervision of violent sexual predators and a more active approach for notifying communities that an offender is about to be released into their midst. In 2001, Curran urged legislators to pass a law to keep criminals with a history of sex crimes locked up after they complete their prison terms.

SANTA MARIA, Calif. - Prosecutors depicted Michael Jackson yesterday as a cunning pedophile who preyed on a young cancer survivor, but defense attorneys painted a contrasting picture of a naive, childlike musician targeted by a family of con artists. With each side experiencing its share of highs and lows over three months of testimony, the molestation case against Jackson could come down to which attorney is more persuasive: smooth-talking Jackson lawyer Thomas A. Mesereau Jr. or intense Santa Barbara County Senior Deputy District Attorney Ronald Zonen.

In a discovery that could yield new insights into the evolutionary forces at work in fish and possibly other animals, a scientist at Washington University in St. Louis has found that certain species prefer mates with large reproductive organs over those with small ones. But this advantage comes at a cost: Males with larger reproductive organs also turned out to be slower swimmers and thus less capable of evading predators. The study, published online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, involved the mosquitofish, a guppylike creature less than 2 inches long.

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. - When Mark Lunsford dressed to go to the Capitol yesterday morning, he put on dark pants, a white shirt and a dark necktie patterned with painful memories. It bore a dozen repeating pictures of his 9-year-old daughter, Jessica, smiling broadly. Since her death and the arrest of a convicted sex offender who has been charged with killing her, Jessica's father has worn the tie again and again to lobby lawmakers to tighten the state's pedophile laws. "That's my hug," he said of the tie, which he wore as he watched Gov. Jeb Bush sign a package of laws named for his daughter.

Annapolis lore has it that when victorious Gen. George Washington resigned his commission here one December day in 1783, he cut through a certain alley from the State House to Mann's, his hotel, and then marked the occasion with friends at the popular Coffee House. Mann's and the Coffee House are long gone, but the alley that the nation's first president most likely took, Chancery Lane, is still a well-walked, sloping footpath between Annapolis' State Circle and Main Street. Not all the dozen or so named alleys in Annapolis glow with grand moments in American history.

Sitting in the crowded cafeteria, parents chattered excitedly as they learned the fundamentals of Internet chat: lol - laughing out loud; ttyl - talk to you later; pal - parents are listening. But watching the excited adults only made Sara Shirvan nervous. First, her parents wouldn't let her walk to school. Then came parental-approved-only movies. Now this: a workshop to warn parents about the dangers of the Internet. "Parents sure can be overprotective," said the 13-year-old, almost yelling the last word to ensure her mother could hear from across the table.

NEW YORK -- Less than a block from Grand Central Station, a new stock market is being born. It doesn't employ hundreds of shouting traders, have a slick Madison Avenue advertising campaign or fancy offices. Instead, a tangle of gray computer and phone wires hangs from the ceiling, secondhand desks abut each other and employees in the sales group, help desk, operations and marketing departments are jammed into a small white room tucked away from the bustling crowd on East 42nd Street. "We do have a Renoir on the wall," quipped Alfred R. Berkeley III, chairman of Pipeline Trading Systems LLC, noting a cheap framed print of a painting by Pierre Auguste Renoir that hangs in a corner.