Sad but true: attempts to use the DNA of extinct species to resurrect lost-long creatures—the quagga, the wooly mammoth and of course those Jurassic Park dinosaurs—hasn’t exactly worked (yet?), so I have a proposal. Scientists who study ancient DNA should abandon their current projects and focus on bringing back the one extinct life-form that would spice up modern life without, you know, leading to rampaging velociraptors: Vikings.

Extracting ancient DNA is tricky, what with modern DNA so ubiquitous. You risk contaminating your Neanderthal genes with, say, the genes of your grad student (and we all know how careless grad students are about leaving their genes lying around). But scientists in Denmark say they were really, really careful when they exhumed ten Viking skeletons, dating from about AD 1,000, from a burial site on the Danish island of Funen. Wearing protective suits, they removed teeth from the Vikings’ jaws at the moment the skeletons were unearthed, extracted DNA, and did all their analysis under carefully-controlled conditions to avoid contamination.

According to their report, being posted tonight on the Website of the journal PLoS One, they succeeded: the ancient DNA they extracted shows no evidence of contamination with the modern kind, Jørgen Dissing and colleagues at the University of Copenhagen say.

Sure, quaggas are cute and mammoths are majestic, but let’s be frank: think how much more fun it would be to clone Vikings. You know, even hunkier versions of, say, Viggo Mortensen (American mom, Danish dad).

It is the dream of children of any age to fly, and I don’t mean United or Delta. Yet if new research is right, then at least some of the magnificent flying reptiles of the Mesozoic called pterosaurs preferred to walk, thank you very much—at least for mealtime.

Pterosaurs called azhdarchids lived during the Upper Cretaceous (roughly 145 million to 65 million years ago), and include such crowd favorites as the gigantic Quetzalcoatlus northropi, with a wing span of 35 feet. Paleontologists studying azhdarchid fossils have concluded that they were “vulture-like scavengers, sediment probers, swimmers, waders, aerial predators, or stork-like generalists [or, most recently] . . . skim-feeders, trawling their lower jaws through water during flight and seizing aquatic prey from the water’s surface,” write scientists in a paper being posted in the journal PLoS One tonight.

Mark Witton and Darren Naish of the University of Portsmouth beg to differ. That model, they continue, “lacks critical support from anatomy and functional morphology.” For instance, these toothless pterosaurs lacked the compressed lower jaw and shock-absorbing apparatus that you need if you’re going to plow into a lake to score chow.

Instead, an analysis of these pterosaurs’ anatomy (weak jaws, ill-suited for crashing into water and snaring prey; poor neck flexibility, forcing the creatures to hold their necks like crocodiles rather than flex it like seagulls; wings better suited to soaring on rising thermals rather than flapping in precision-controlled flight down to the surface of a lake or sea) as well as their footprints (showing they were good walkers and runners, but with small padded feet better for strutting around on land than for wading around lake margins or swimming should they land on water) and the distribution of their fossils (in terrestrial more than marine sediments) adds up to one conclusion, the scientists say: azhdarchids (from the Uzbek word for “dragon”) used their long limbs to stalk, picking up small animals and other prey from the ground.

“All the details of their anatomy, and the environment their fossils are found in, show that they made their living by walking around, reaching down to grab and pick up animals and other prey,” said Naish. Their “bizarrely stiff neck has previously been a problem for other ideas about azhdarchid lifestyle, but it fits with our model, as all a terrestrial stalker needs to do its raise and lower its bill tip to the ground.”

Based on the fossils, Witton has produced images of the 10-foot-tall azhdarchid named Hatzegopteryxwould standing beside a man, a group of Quetzalcoatlus strolling around a prairie picking off baby dinosaurs for lunch, and one of them flying toward you.

Nothing against the ancient and beautiful Italian port city of Genoa, but physicist Brian Greene wasn’t going to stand idly by while it had a world-renowned science festival and New York did not. When Greene spoke at the 2005 Genoa festival, he recalled over a recent breakfast with me, “it was enormously impressive: science was filling the streets, science was taking over. We stood in the square and said, ‘this should be happening in the U.S.’”

“We” are Green and his wife, award-winning news- and documentary-producer Tracy Day, and together they are on the verge of pulling it off. Enlisting Nobel laureates and actors, artists, choreographers, musicians and kids, they have organized the World Science Festival, which kicks off with an invitation-only “world science summit” tomorrow and then opens the doors to all comers for four days of events from May 29 to June 1 throughout New York City.

From the science of sports and of Disney Imagineering (want to know how they engineer those roller coasters at Disney theme parks?) to the brain basis of  morality and the neurobiology underlying the Bourne trilogy, the festival aims to be entertaining and fun, Day said, “communicating real science ideas with integrity. We want kids to see the pyrotechnics and the animated dinosaur [from the Disney Imagineers] and say, ‘huh, so that’s science?’, and see that with a degree in science you can go work for Disney.”

Never quite grasped the probabilistic nature of quantum physics? A dance performance at the Guggenheim Museum, inspired by Green’s best-selling book The Elegant Universe, includes a giant die: to demonstrate the random nature of the physical world, the dance progresses according to which side the die lands on. Puzzled about the parallel/multiworlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, developed by the late physicist Hugh Everett? Hear from his son Mark Everett, an indie rocker, and two physicists to explore whether there are kazillions of you's in parallel universes.

The goal, says Greene, “is to create an excitement and buzz around science that it usually doesn’t have, to change how people talk about science, to change the zeitgeist so that science becomes something people want to engage with.”

Moving science toward the center of the larger cultural landscape is a tall order, especially in a time (now) and place (the U.S.) where what political conservatives call (contemptuously) the “reality-based community” (the earliest reference I find is in this 2004 story about a 2002 conversation with a White House adviser) includes scientists.

You can wow people all you want with gee-whiz science. At the end of the day, and the end of the festival, the challenge that science poses to the world view of millions of people—among whom the Bible and not Einstein or Darwin holds the correct account of the birth of the universe and the history of life on Earth, to name just two—ain’t going away. But if science can be made warm and fuzzy or cool and edgy, maybe the visceral animosity between the two opposed world views will dissipate like the smoke form those Imagineers’ pyrotechnics, at least a little.