Fascinating Facts About Dinosaur I
Fascinating Facts About Dinosaur I
2. Dinosaurs lived on the earth for over 165 million years but then they mysteriously became extinct.
3. There were lots of different kinds of dinosaurs that lived at different times. Some were HUGE…and some were much smaller.
4. Some dinosaurs could move along quite quickly on two legs. Others walked on four legs in a very slow and clumsy fashion.
5. Different dinosaurs liked to eat different things. Dinosaurs like the diplodocus liked to eat leaves: these dinosaurs are called herbivores. Dinosaurs like the velociraptor, or the T-Rex, liked to eat meat: these dinosaurs are called carnivores.
6. All of the dinosaurs looked quite different. They could have…horns,armour plating,bumpy skin or wings. There were lots of other differences too!
7. Dinosaurs lived on earth more than 215 million years ago. They lived in most parts of the world.
They ruled the earth for nearly 150 million years. Dinosaurs have been extinct for 65 million years.
Extinct - something that once alive but no longer exist anywhere on the earth.
8. Paleontologist-scientist who studies fossils. Fossil-what is left of a plant or animal that lived long ago. Dinosaur-animal that lived millions of years ago. Dinosaurs were not lizards or reptiles but many did lay eggs. Some had skin like crocodiles while others skin was much smoother.
9. Paleontologist give each dinosaur a name that best describes it.
10. Tyrannosaurus Rex means “lizard king”
11. Dinosaurs were one of several kinds of prehistoric reptiles that lived during the Mesozoic Era the “Age of the Reptiles”.
12. The name dinosaur comes from the term Dinosauria, which means terrible lizards.
13. Dinosaur is the name of a group of prehistoric reptiles that ruled the earth about 160 million years ago.These animals died out millions of years ago, but they have fascinated people ever since they were first described in the early 1800’s.
14. The allosaurus was designated the State Fossil in 1988. More allosaurus specimens have been found in two of Utah's quarries than any other dinosaur. Sixty individuals, from juveniles to adults, were found at one site in Utah.
15. Paleontology (PAY lee ahn TAHL uh jee), is the study of animals, plants, and other organisms that lived in prehistoric times (more than 5,500 years ago). Fossil remains of organisms occur in layers of sedimentary rocks (rocks formed when mineral matter settled out of air, ice, or water). The organisms that are now fossils were alive when the rocks were being formed. They were buried and preserved as the layers of rock piled up.
16. Fossils are the reason we have most of this information. For almost 200 years, paleontologists have been discovering fossils all over the world. They’ve identified more than 330 different kinds of dinosaur fossils. And every year, they find new fossils. These fossils can tell us how big an animal grew, what it ate, even how it died.
17. A stony frieze at one of the continent’s largest and richest dinosaur quarries holds the bones of
beasts that ruled the Jurassic: stegosaurs, allosaurs, apatosaurs and many more.
18. The first dinosaur to be described scientifically was Megalosaurus in 1824, by William Buckland. Buckland (1784-1856) was a British fossil hunter and clergyman who discovered some Megalosaurus fossils in 1819 and named the reptile in 1824. It was the first dinosaur ever described scientifically and first theropod dinosaur discovered (this is all in hindsight, because the dinosaurs had not yet been recognized as a separate taxonomic group - the word dinosaur hadn't even been invented yet).
19. Tyrannosaurus Rex was one of the biggest of the meat-eating dinosaurs.
20. Dinosaurs are a groups of prehistoric animals that had a set of particular skeletal features. They lived during the Mesozoic Era, which lasted for almost 180million years. Some dinosaurs were huge - over 15 times the size of an elephant; others - more than half - were less than 15 feet long.
21. Non-dinosaur animals included: flying reptiles such as pterodactyls; giant aquatic creatures such as the plesiosaurs, giant sea turtles, and huge prehistoric crocodiles; primitive sail-back reptiles such as Dimerodon; and saber-toothed cats and wooly mammoths.
22. Dinosaurs are generally named after a characteristic body feature, the place where they were found, or a person involved in the discovery. Like all living things named by scientists, the name consists of two Greek or Latin words (or combinations). For example, the Greek and Latin combination Tyrannosaurus rex means “king of the tyrant lizards.” The word “dinosaur” comes from two Greek words meaning “terrible lizard.”
23. Paleontologists have divided dinosaurs into two separate order of reptiles,based upon their skeletons: lizard-hipped dinosaurs (the saursischians) andbird-hipped dinosaurs (the ornithischians). Lizard-hipped dinosaurs had hips shaped like those of lizards. Some were meat eaters, like the Tyrannosaurus. Others were plant eaters, like the Apatosaurus (also known as Brontosaurus) and its relatives.
24. Dinosaurs moved differently from a reptiles such as a turtle, crocodile or lizard. Most dinosaurs walked with their legs under their bodies for support, which raised them above the ground. But lizards, crocodiles and turtles move very close to the ground, with their legs sprawled out to the sides away from their bodies.
25. Paleontologists believe that dinosaurs laid hard-shelled eggs, similar to those laid by birds,instead of soft-shelled eggs like those of turtles and other reptiles.
26. Some dinosaurs also had grasping hands, as people do. Unlike other reptiles, these dinosaurs would have been able to grasp and hold things, such as their prey. But, even though there are many differing characteristics, paleontologists aren’t sure exactly how dinosaurs compare to modern day reptiles.
27. Several lines of evidence suggest that some dinosaurs were able to regulate their body temperature in the same sense that modern birds and mammals are. Other scientists think it unlikely that any dinosaur could have had a rapid metabolic rate.
28. The largest dinosaur we know from a complete skeleton was Brachiosaurus (“arm lizard”). It reached 23 meters in length and 12 meters in height (about the length of two large school busses and the height of a four-story building). Fragments of leg bones and vertebrae of even larger dinosaur species are known, but these skeletal remains are too incomplete to determine their exact size. Several of these (Andesaurus, Seismosaurus and Supersaurus) might have been one and one half to two times larger than Brachiosaurus and almost the weight of a blue whale. The smallest dinosaurs were about the size of a chicken.
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