THE COMPLETE DINOSAUR PDF, EPUB, EBOOK James O. Farlow, M.K. Brett-Surman | 768 pages | 01 Aug 1999 | Indiana University Press | 9780253213136 | English | Bloomington, IN, United States Dinosaur Facts | HowStuffWorks Bedtime exploit this dynamic perfectly; by the last page, the dress-up dinosaur has finally settled down for a night's sleep, after winning a series of dramatic battles against a playground slide, a bowl of spaghetti, and talking grown-ups. Believe it or not, until 20 years ago, most kids learned about dinosaurs from mounted skeletons in museums, and not computer-animated documentaries on The Discovery Channel or the BBC. Because they're so big and so unfamiliar, dinosaur skeletons are somehow less creepy than the skeletons left by modern wolves or big cats or human beings, for that matter. In fact, many kids prefer their dinosaurs in skeleton form—especially when they're putting together scale-sized models of a Stegosaurus or Brachiosaurus! Finally, and most important, dinosaurs are really, really cool. If you don't grasp that simple idea, then you probably shouldn't be reading this article in the first place. Perhaps you'd be more comfortable learning about birding or potted plants! In reality, the mosasaur was a smaller, frill-less aquatic creature. The scene in Jurassic Park when the dino sneezes on the kid and sprays goo everywhere is pretty funny. That was a lot of slime. But regardless of the humor involved, the brachiosaurus couldn't sneeze due to its long neck. Apparently, the creature's neck was so long that a sneeze would likely have caused its head to explode. Dinosaurs existed starting about million years ago, and they disappeared completely only 65 million years ago. A lot has changed here on Earth in 65 million years, what with the rise of people and all. But while 65 million years is really long, that means there were still millions of years when dinosaurs were around. Stegosaurus and T. In Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, our heroes get trapped in a jail cell underneath the mansion of their once-patron, now-evil dinosaur trader. They use a small but thick-skulled dinosaur to escape by tricking it into smashing through the wall and then through the cell door. As such, smashing through a brick wall and then a steel gate to save our heroes, while good cinema, isn't accurate. Movies love to make their monsters bulletproof to some degree. It makes killing the bad guy that much more interesting. But when movies place dinosaurs, which are really just animals, as the bad guys, it gets a little bit weird. Dinosaur hides could've been thick, but more like how a bear's hide is thick. Like any hunter could tell you, shooting a bear with a 9mm handgun is likely to make it upset, but something with a larger caliber would do the trick just fine. It's no different with the T. Definitely not bulletproof. Turns out the internet was getting so upset over a woman outrunning a T. They were just too big. They could, however, walk very quickly. They must've been fast in some way, right? Though T. That's a speed-walking record, surely. Regardless, the scene in Jurassic Park in which the T. After hatching, the babies came out small — roughly the size of a turkey and covered in fuzz. They lost much of their fuzz over time, keeping only small patches on their heads and tails into adulthood. It's probably a safe bet, then, to say that many bird-like dinosaurs looked like ducklings during their juvenile years. Any movie showcasing a baby dinosaur cracking out of its egg to reveal scales isn't quite accurate. The king of dinosaurs couldn't even roar? Now it just seems a lot less scary. But wait. If it couldn't roar, what sound could it make? The T. Knowing that the T. Over two decades of the Jurassic Park T. But cooing? Oh, how the mighty fall. Many films seem to show dinosaurs as slow, lumbering, lethargic giants. And sure, T. Dinosaurs had massive hearts that allowed them to move quickly and pumped the necessary blood to their immense muscles. This means that they could move their limbs at an alarming speed and, therefore, move very quickly. It's a common trope in the Jurassic Park series that the T. But of course they can see things that size — how could they not? How can a creature with eyes that big, known for its predatory nature, not see prey standing still? Imagine a T. It would bump into trees pretty frequently, and it surely would have starved to death. All the prey had to do was stand completely still and voila — perfectly safe. A predator prowling for food because it's hungry is aggressive, yes? So, naturally, a predatory dinosaur would've been the same way. But the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park are really aggressive all the time. Raptors continue stalking people after already eating several of them. Pterodactyls snatch humans after escaping their enclosure. The dinosaurs in this fictional theme park were probably well fed. It's a kind of zoo, after all. If they were well fed, then what really would've happened was that they would simply have ignored the running people because they were full. The acid-spitting, shrunken menace was distorted by artistic license, once again. The first dinosaurs existed on pretty much an equal footing with their archosaur, crocodile and pterosaur cousins; if you traveled back to the late Triassic period, you would never have guessed that these reptiles, above and beyond all the others, were fated to inherit the earth. That all changed with the still-mysterious and little-known Triassic- Jurassic Extinction Event, which wiped out the majority of archosaurs and therapsids "mammal-like reptiles" but spared the dinosaurs. No one knows exactly why; it may have had something to do with the upright posture of the first dinosaurs or perhaps their slightly more sophisticated lungs. By the start of the Jurassic period, dinosaurs had already started to diversify into the ecological niches left abandoned by their doomed cousins--the most important such event being the late Triassic split between saurischian "lizard-hipped" and ornithischian "bird-hipped dinosaurs. Most of the very first dinosaurs can be considered saurischians, as can the "sauropodomorphs" into which some of these early dinosaurs evolved--slender, two-legged herbivores and omnivores that eventually evolved into the giant prosauropods of the early Jurassic period and the even bigger sauropods and titanosaurs of the later Mesozoic Era. As far as we can tell, ornithischian dinosaurs--which included ornithopods , hadrosaurs , ankylosaurs , and ceratopsians , among other families-- could trace their ancestry all the way back to Eocursor, a small, two-legged dinosaur of late Triassic South Africa. Eocursor itself would have ultimately derived from an equally small South American dinosaur, most likely Eoraptor, that lived 20 million or so years earlier--an object lesson in how such a vast diversity of dinosaurs could have originated from such a humble progenitor. Share Flipboard Email. Bob Strauss. Science Writer. What Do You Call a Person Who Studies Dinosaurs? Most titanosaurids were about 40 to 50 feet long, but a few became gigantic. The titanosaurids lived mainly in the southern hemisphere during the Cretaceous Period, surviving there as the northern-hemisphere sauropods became extinct. The theropods were all the predatory dinosaurs except the herrerasaurians. From the smallest dinosaurs to the largest meat-eaters, the theropods had the most different kinds of saurischian dinosaurs of all suborders. These two-legged meat-eaters had clawed feet with no more than three functional toes. The wings and feet of birds are similar to the arms and feet of theropod skeletons. Also like birds, all theropods to some extent had hollow hones. The best ancestral bird is the small, feathered, theropodlike Archaeopteryx from the Late Jurassic. The theropods evolved into two major groups: the Ceratosauria, with flexible tails; and the Tetanurae, with stiff tails. All the earliest theropods were ceratosaurians. Their fossil record is from the Late Triassic through the Late Jurassic. The tetanurans appeared in the Middle Jurassic, diversified in the Late Jurassic, and were the main northern-hemisphere predators until the Late Cretaceous. It was small and nimble and had a long, slender skull with many teeth. Families: Halticosauridae and Ceratosauridae : Dilophosaurus, which lived during the Early Jurassic, had a double crest on its head. Ceratosaurus was from the Late Jurassic and had a horn on its head. Both were from North America and are examples of later members of the ceratosaurians. After the Late Jurassic, ceratosaurians apparently vanished in the northern hemisphere but survived in South America. Family: Abelisauridae : The abelisaurids are a group of medium to large African and South American theropods characterized by short, tall skulls. Carnotaurus from Argentina and Majungatholus from Madagascar are similar with the exception that Carnotaurus has two large horns on the skull. The tetanurans, the most advanced theropods, included several groups where the relationships are not well understood. Crests and other decorations on the head were usually not present. Their hands had three or fewer fingers, and the "thumb" usually had the largest claw. It was the smallest theropod, about three feet long and lightly built. Family: Coeluridae : Ornitholestes and Coelurus, which lived during the Late Jurassic in western North America, were fast-running, lightly built theropods that were two to three feet tall at the hips and from six to ten feet long. Family: Carcharodontosauridae : This group of giant theropods from Gondwana includes enormous predatory dinosaurs, Giganotosaurus from Argentina and Car-charodontosaurus from North Africa.