With a fast and exuberant laugh, he has a passion for subjects ranging from technology (he heads Microsoft's advanced-research group) to dinosaurs (he's about to publish a paper on the aerodynamics of the apatosaurus tail) to cooking.

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Visit the Yale University Art Gallery, which houses more than 185, 000 pieces of international and American art, or the Peabody Museum of Natural History, which displays mounted apatosaurus and stegosaurus dinosaur bones in its great hall.

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Between them they named 130 species, doubling the number known to science, though many were so hastily identified, and based on so few bones, that they turned out to be duplicates (such as the massive herbivore apatosaurus, a.k.a brontosaurus) or mix-ups (such as the three-horned triceratops, which Marsh swore was "one of the largest of American bovines").

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