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Ronald S. Tykoski is the vice president of science and curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Perot Museum of Nature and Science, where he has worked since 2005 (when it was called the Dallas Museum of Natural History). The museum’s latest exhibition, on loan from the American Museum of Natural History, is titled “T. rex: The Ultimate Predator.” It runs through September 22.

The American Museum of Natural History first staged a T. rex exhibit in 1915. Its pose was determined by the physical space of the museum, and it changed over the years. So what did they send you, and how does it reflect our current understanding? When that mount was revealed, it reflected a mindset of these animals as big lizards. It had this tripod kangaroo-like pose, but it was also a constraint of the engineering of mounting this big, heavy skeleton, so they needed to brace it. But in the decades that followed, we started revising our picture of what these animals were like. The exhibit that is now here at the Perot shows Tyrannosaurus rex in a modern light, with the horizontal spine, head out in front, the tail out behind, beautifully balanced on huge back legs.

Well, it finally happened. Thirty years after their stunning divorce, after digs and snipes and a two-year waiting period, Jerry Jones inducted Jimmy Johnson into the Dallas Cowboys Ring of Honor during Dallas’ home game against Detroit on December 30. 

This is a big deal. Only the very best of the very best that America’s Team has to offer make the cut. Nineteen of the 23 enshrined members are Pro Football Hall of Famers, and two more have been finalists. For Johnson, joining Tom Landry in the club codifies his legacy as one of the two signature coaches in franchise history.

This induction carries extra weight because this is Jerry and Jimmy, the old Arkansas Razorback teammates who reunited to conquer the football world together and fell out just as spectacularly. In the time since Johnson and Jones parted ways, following Dallas’ second consecutive Super Bowl victory, the Cowboys owner called his former head coach disloyal and declared that 500 other coaches could have won a Super Bowl with Dallas’ talent-rich rosters. And he deflected talk about the delay in scheduling Johnson’s Ring of Honor induction by declaring, “It isn’t, at the end of the day, all tailored around whether Jimmy is sniveling or not.”

Kyndall “Fire” Magyar must be the only cruise director who lives in Crowley, Texas. On December 23, she will sail from Galveston on the maiden voyage of the Carnival Jubilee, a $1 billion Excel-class ship that has 19 decks and carries more than 6,400 passengers. It’s her job to make sure they all have a good time.

No disrespect to Crowley, but that seems like an odd place for a cruise director to live. How did you wind up working on the high seas? I started cruising when I was 7 years old, back in 2002. It was our family vacation every single year, and then when I went to college at Texas A&M, I got a tourism management degree. We did a study aboard trip, and I did an eight-day cruise with 28 other students where we learned about what it is like to work in the cruise industry.

Chase Leavell cuts an unusual figure for the co-owner of a steel fabricator in West Dallas. I hasten to admit I have met only one co-owner of a steel fabricator in West Dallas or anywhere else, for that matter. With his easy demeanor, chest-length beard, and long, gray hair held back by a pair of black-framed eyeglasses perched atop his head, he gives off a Dude vibe from The Big Lebowski. Picture the friendliest, most laid-back sea captain you can imagine. That’s Chase Leavell.

Sitting in his laminate-paneled office at Contractors Iron and Steel, where rolls of engineering drawings proliferate, the 47-year-old offers me the short version of his family’s history. His great-great-grandfather came to Dallas in 1898, founded Wyatt Industries, and sold enough boilers that he could afford a house on Swiss Avenue. Leavell’s grandfather, father, and uncle all lived in Lakewood and graduated from Woodrow Wilson High School. His father eventually moved the family to Lake Highlands. Leavell attended Lake Highlands High; his three children now roam its halls.

Leavell wears a Rolex Submariner that his father gave him when he graduated from UNT. By then, he’d already spent a lot of time at Contractors Iron and Steel, which his grandfather had founded and moved in 1963 to its location on North Beckley Avenue. From the parking lot looking roughly east, the view goes: grassy, horizon-gobbling Trinity River levee; squat, brown Dallas County Jail; 72 stories of blue glass on the Bank of America Plaza. In the right light, the glass mirrors the sky, and it seems impossible that so much downtown could be so near such an industrial neighborhood. Leavell started coming here when he was 14. He would sweep up around the shop. He loved the place, how huge the machinery, how huge everything, seemed. 

“I’m sorry, but we will not be able to print your obituary.”

It was an editor at the Los Angeles Times. I had called to ask why my mother’s obit still had not appeared in the paper more than a week after I had submitted it. You would think getting a few final words published about America’s first woman rocket scientist would be easy, but such was not the case. Despite a long career that included numerous achievements in the early aerospace business, Mary Sherman Morgan’s legacy—as I was about to discover—had vanished. No one had seen fit to document her accomplishments.

“We cannot verify any of the information in your article,” the editor said. “We cannot even verify that your mother ever existed.” After pointing out that in the absence of my mother’s existence, we would not be having our conversation, I hung up. 

In all fairness, the Los Angeles Times was right. In journalism, printed facts need to be verified by research before they can be published. The editor was simply following the rules. So what does one do when history has failed to record someone who deserved to be recorded? I decided my mother’s life was too significant to be forgotten. I would put her back into the aerospace record by interviewing former co-workers and collecting what little solid information was still available. And from this information I would write a play. Thus began what has become a 20-year mission to restore my mother’s lost legacy.

Future historians will debate when, exactly, Eric Johnson, the mayor of Dallas, began regularly wearing a cowboy hat. It seems likely that he made the fashion choice when the Stars lost to the Golden Knights in the playoffs. On May 31, Johnson tweeted a video of himself at Wild Bill’s Western Store in the West End, where, to satisfy a mayoral bet, he bought a black felt Stetson for the mayor of Las Vegas. 

Giddy-up. A week later, Johnson was wearing a traditional straw cowboy hat outside the Harry Stone Aquatic Center, giving a shoutout to the Park and Rec Department. And then came August 16, a Wednesday. For an alfresco CBS Channel 11 interview about the Dallas Police Department’s crime-reduction efforts, the mayor wore a thinner-brimmed cowboy hat that we can only hope will become the emblem of his second term. He wore it again on August 28 for an outdoor event at which he lobbied for bond money for parks. Ken Kalthoff at NBC Channel 5, on the scene, reported that it was a “park ranger hat to dramatize his commitment to improving parks.” 

Anyone who has seen Ken’s Mojo Dojo Casa House could hardly blame him for the mistake.

“Ken does the best he can,” Mayor Johnson told us in an email helpfully sent by his chief of staff, “but clearly he knows nothing about haberdashery.”

Like many babies of the family, Luke Sardello’s youth was set to the soundtrack of his older sibling’s albums. For him, that meant classic rock, Journey, and the like. It all changed in junior high when a friend played for him Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back.

“The way it sounded was like nothing I’d ever heard,” says Sardello, who now co-owns the Josey Records retail shops, record label Skylark Soul Co., and the recently launched Tuned In Grading, a biz that grades vinyl records and encapsulates them in tamper-proof packaging. “That record was one of the first that really threw a bunch of stuff at the wall with sampling. It almost had some punk elements to it. It was very loud. And it changed the way rap sounded.”

He got a job at Bill’s Records and Tapes while in high school. “That’s when the bug really caught me,” Sardello says. The “bug” being record collecting. Sardello was getting his hands on European imports—The Cure, The Smiths—that weren’t as easy to find at chain stores like Sound Warehouse. He also began falling into musical rabbit holes by reading the liner notes of house music and hip-hop albums to find the songs’ musical origins. “At the time, hip-hop was based a lot on jazz and soul of the ’60s and ’70s,” Sardello says, “and house music was very much based on disco from the ’70s and early ’80s.” 

Halfway between Fort Worth and Abilene, 75 miles from both, the hills and soft cuestas of the Western Cross Timbers break through the prairie. This is where North Texas will have its first new state park in 25 years, Palo Pinto Mountains State Park. 

“The goal of this property is to provide more outdoor recreation opportunities for Texans, especially from the Metroplex,” says James Adams, the park’s superintendent. Among those opportunities will be 12.5 miles of multiuse trails of varying difficulty, primitive camping areas, and plenty of water activities.

Located southwest of Strawn, a ranching community in Palo Pinto County, the park is centered on the 90-acre Tucker Lake. As the lake is one of the two water supplies to Strawn residents, gas-powered boats are prohibited. Adams says this ban also aims to reduce wakes and noise pollution. But the lake is not off-limits: there is a wheelchair-​accessible fishing pier and kayak and canoe launch, and visitors can swim, too. 

Palo Pinto’s 4,900 acres offer the usual outdoorsy fun, such as hiking and horseback riding. But deep within the park, among the juniper and oak and the bobcats and whitetail deer that call the area home, is a “really rich” catalog of history, Adams says. The current trails don’t extend to these historical spaces yet, but he hopes that soon enough they will. (Eighteen more miles of hiking trails are planned for construction.)

By the time you read this, 60-year-old retired Dallas lawyer Scott Kline will have (hopefully) just run a marathon in all 50 states. He ran No. 46 in May, in Rhode Island. Leaving the finish line at the state Capitol, he was engaged by a man who pulled up in his car and asked, “What is going on over there?” Kline said, “We just finished a marathon.” The driver responded, “Is it the Boston Marathon?” Kline thought for a few seconds before answering, “No, that’s in Boston, and we’re in Rhode Island now, so this is the Providence Marathon.” Here are the stories from his insane quest.

At this point, Nick Barclay is probably a bit sick of me. He and I have never met, yet years ago I managed to insult him and his wife, and then, more recently, I set in motion a series of events that consumed many hours of his time, some of it on the phone, some in the kitchen.

Barclay is a chef. If you’ve lived in Dallas for a minute, you probably recognize his name. Two decades ago, he cooked a modern Euro-British menu at his Barclay’s, in a converted Victorian house on Fairmount Street. Then he and his wife, Kelli, left us to live closer to his mother in Cornwall, England, where for many years they ran a small hotel that was built in 1890. Dallas drew them back, and, in 2017, they opened a restaurant in Richardson that specialized in fish and chips. It was called Fish & Fizz.

That’s when I started throwing brickbats. The name struck me as silly. A place called Bourbon & Banter had just opened downtown. A wave of This & That establishments was crashing against our river’s white rock banks—if you’ll excuse the tortured allusion to Dover. I certainly did my level best to torture Barclay, writing a post on D Magazine’s FrontBurner blog about his new restaurant’s name, offering a list of names he had supposedly rejected. Proper manners prevent me from rehashing that entire list, but here are a few of the entries: Flounder & Fingers, Trout & Tankards, Shad & Chard, Haddock & Hops, Perch & Pints, Roughy & Rosé, and Long John Silver’s.

Fish & Fizz closed in February of this year. Apparently I couldn’t let Barclay rest. Because a number of months ago, I asked another Englishman, Richard Patterson, to find me the best fish and chips in Dallas. Did I know that Richard’s quest would lead him to Barclay and that the latter would suffer entire afternoons on the phone with Richard, until finally, hammered into submission—something the Germans know is difficult to do to an Englishman—Barclay would be forced to retreat to a borrowed kitchen and cook for Richard? You can’t prove I didn’t see that coming.

In any case, Richard’s story in this month’s issue, “The Ultimate Dallas Fish and Chips Odyssey,” ends with Barclay. But Barclay’s story in Dallas? Again, proper manners must be my guide. So I’ll say only this: folks, keep your Sarson’s handy.

To read more on Richard’s hunt for the best fish and chips in Dallas, click here.

The Great Trinity Forest Gateway and Horse Trail is a quaint park anchored by a fishing pond and a pavilion encircled by a half-mile concrete jogging loop. On a September morning, a Cooper’s hawk sails between trees on the north side of the water, and a couple of mutt ducks—mallards that likely mated with escaped domestics—paddle near the shore on the south. It is quiet except for the thrum of Interstate 20 to our backs. 

This 10-year-old park is the bookend of the forest, one of the primary access points to the 6,000 or so acres of woods near the city’s southern border. A concrete path splits from the jogging trail and leads out of the park and into the hackberries and elms, the start of about a 2-mile walk to the limestone-cragged overlook called the McCommas Bluff Preserve. If you’re willing to slog through some brush, it’s another 10-minute hike north to the Trinity River Audubon Center, the city’s educational centerpiece for the forest. 

The best way to get there? “Follow the Modelos,” says Ben Sandifer, the 6-foot-8 genial giant who has become one of the handful of citizen protectors of this vast land. The accountant found his passion in these woods a decade ago, something that channeled his inner Boy Scout and pushed him to become a serious naturalist. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of the flora and fauna and human history of this overlooked part of our city, dating back to before Native Americans settled above the Trinity River.

The Modelos are a bit of a bummer for Sandifer. The empty cases and spent bottles are a reminder that not everyone cherishes this place like he does. Another sign: the tire tracks.