In an auction battle between two odd items yesterday at Bonhams New York, a few fossilized pieces of 130-million-year-old dinosaur dung sold for nearly one thousand dollars, but a 4.5 billion-year-old meteorite didn't find any takers.

Dakota is the name given to the remains of an Edmontosaurus discovered on a ranch in the Badlands in 1999. What sets Dakota apart from all but four other dinosaurs so far unearthed is its completeness. And not just its complete skeleton—nearly all of Dakota’s skin and soft tissues have been fossilized, which is an exceedingly rare discovery in paleontology. The perfect conditions had to exist at the time of the animal’s demise—being rapidly buried in substrate at just the right moisture level to bring about fossilization instead of decay.

Refer to "Pleo" as a robotic pet, and its co-inventor, Caleb Chung (of Furby fame), will quickly set you straight: Pleo is a designer life-form. That's because, on the outside, everything about the one-week-old Camarasaurus is very unrobotic. Its movements are fluid, not rigid; its actions are seemingly spontaneous and unprogrammed; and its skin is smooth, seamless and stretchy. Inside, however, the 3.3-pound Pleo is very robotic indeed.