Like most young kids, I was BIG into dinosaurs. They were carnivorous beasts—fierce and voracious. They were lumbering giants—docile and majestic. They inspired my imagination. They made me wonder what life would be like with dinosaurs roaming about my backyard—I lived on a farm, so thankfully had a BIG yard.
I had my coloring books (I used up the gray crayon on them) and various books which I gleaned knowledge from. But since I was a tyke, I haven’t paid much attention to these behemoths from the Mesozoic Era, the Age of Dinosaurs. My interests revolved more and more around aliens and robots and dragons as I began to read J.R.R. Tolkein and Isaac Asimov. And of course, write fantasy and science fiction stories.
But as a writer, you are never sure what your next project will be, and I recently found myself needing to bone up on dinosaurs (excuse the pun!). Here are a few ways in which dinosaurs of today are different than the dinosaurs I grew up with.
Triceratops horns most likely were not used for defense, but to show their maturity—different aged Triceratops had differently shaped and sized horns. Certain, forward curving horns showed that a Triceratops was an adult and ready to mate.
Giganotosaurus and many other Theropods, such as Velociraptor and Allosaurus, hunted in packs like wolves. This allowed them not only to bring down bigger prey, such as the monstrous Argentinosaurus (possibly the largest dinosaur), but to teach their young how to hunt.
There is no such thing as a Brontosaurus. It was a case of mistaken identity. Othniel Charles Marsh discovered Apatosaurus, a large planting-eater dinosaur, in the late 1800s. A few years later when he received the bones of a larger planting eating dinosaur he thought they were of another species, which he named Brontosaurus. But really, the first Aptosaurus bones he dug up were probably from a juvenile while that later bones were from an adult.
Birds are basically flying dinosaurs, as in direct descendents of the bird-like Archaeopteryx and Dromaeosaurus. Birds lay hard-shelled eggs—dinosaurs lay hard-shelled eggs. Birds have scales (just check their feet)—dinosaurs have scales. Birds are warm blooded—dinosaurs were most likely warm blooded. And there are many, many other similarities
Tyrannosaurus rex probably had feathers, at least its young did, which is true of most Theropods, the dinosaurs that bird descended from.
Dinosaurs most likely weren’t dull and drab like people once thought, but had camouflaging feathers or colorful scales for mating displays (another similarity to birds). So there is no need to color than gray crayon down to a stub anymore!