Awesome Adventures with Dinosaurs
Travel back far enough and you arrive somewhere genuinely strange: a world run by dinosaurs. Here is what we know about them, and how we know it.
What were dinosaurs?
Dinosaurs were reptiles that lived on land, millions of years ago. They came in every size — some no bigger than a chicken, some longer than a bus.
- They lived during a stretch of time called the Mesozoic Era.
- It is split into three periods: the Triassic, the Jurassic and the Cretaceous.
- That is a very long time. Dinosaurs were around for far longer than people have been.
Plant-eaters and meat-eaters
Some dinosaurs ate plants — they are called herbivores. Others ate animals, and they are carnivores. You can often guess which from the fossils.
- Tyrannosaurus rex — a huge carnivore with enormous jaws and famously tiny arms.
- Triceratops — a plant-eater with three horns and a wide bony frill behind its head.
- Stegosaurus — a plant-eater with tall plates along its back and spikes on its tail.
You find a fossil skull with flat, blunt teeth for grinding, and no sharp cutting teeth at all. What did this dinosaur most likely eat?
- Plants — it was a herbivore
- Other dinosaurs — it was a carnivore
- Nothing, because teeth do not tell us about food
How we know any of this
Nobody has ever seen a living dinosaur. Everything in this article comes from fossils — bones, teeth and footprints that turned to stone and stayed in the ground.
The scientists who study them are called paleontologists, and the work is detective work. Fossils can tell them:
- How big a dinosaur was, from the size of its bones.
- What it ate, from the shape of its teeth.
- How it moved, and sometimes how fast, from its footprints.
A single set of footprints can show whether a dinosaur was walking or running, and whether it was alone.
There is still plenty nobody knows. New dinosaurs are found and named regularly — which means some of what we will know about them has not been discovered yet.