10 common dinosaur misconceptions

The word "dinosaur" comes from two Greekof words. The first deinos, which means "scary", "powerful" or "wonderful." The second is sauros, which means lizard. We are constantly learning new dinosaur facts from their fossils. Over the years, we have accumulated a lot of “facts” that have long been considered true, but were refuted in light of recent debates. Here are ten facts that have changed over time. Forget everything you knew about dinosaurs.

Dinosaurs throw eggs like lizards

In the past, the general opinion was thatdinosaurs left their eggs like reptiles, but recent finds have shown that many dinosaurs cared for their offspring, like modern birds. Fossil remains of dinosaurs and their nests have told a lot about their behavior. Nests range from simple holes to complex structures with mud rims. Met in large groups and one by one. These nests and collections of eggs showed that dinosaurs were caring parents.

In Montana, found a lot of nests Miazavra. Nests, eggs, brood, young and adult dinosaurs, or rather their remains, were also found in the same area. Such a find indicates a high level of parental care and a high sociality of the dinosaur. The nests were holes dug into the ground, 2 meters wide and 1.1 meters deep. Newborns were only 30 centimeters in length. Nests were 9 meters apart, this is the size of an adult Miasvar. In one place, a group of 40 nests covered 2.5 acres of land.

Dinosaurs were covered in scales.

We used to think that all dinosaurs were coveredscales, but recent discoveries have confirmed the existence of more than 30 species of feathered non-flying dinosaurs on grounds such as fossils and feather knobs themselves. Today, all feathered dinosaurs - and this is confirmed - are carnivorous ancestors of birds. But in 2013, the remains of a herbivorous dinosaur were found near the banks of the Tin River in Siberia. This new species of Kulindadromeus zabaikalicus was feathered. Perhaps all dinosaurs had feathers.

K. zabaikalicus lived about 160 million years ago and was 3 meters long. Based on incomplete skeletons, many of which were found, archaeologists have concluded that this bipedal animal had short front paws and long hind legs. It is likely that when the animal lived, a river flowed in its habitat. After death, the river protected the remains of a dinosaur from scavengers, thereby preserving the imprints of feathers and scales.

Dinosaurs were cold blooded

Many people believe that dinosaurs werecold-blooded, like reptiles today, but then they would not have the muscles necessary to hunt other dinosaurs. Scientists evaluated the metabolism of many dinosaurs, determining the percentage of bone mass in the body and the rate of bone growth in the rings of petrified bones. The results showed that dinosaurs had growth and metabolism rates inherent in warm-blooded creatures, rather than cold-blooded ones.

Dinosaurs were not like mammals, birds,reptile or fish. Their physiology was different from modern animals. We thought that dinosaurs were slow, slow-moving, cold-blooded animals, but the more fossil remains are found, the more dinosaurs look like velociraptors. Most likely, they were active warm-blooded mammals and birds.

But to say that all animals are cold-blooded orwarm-blooded, will be too easy. Some of the animals living today, like the great white shark, the leatherback sea turtle and tuna, do not fit into a simple classification. Judging by the rate of growth and metabolism, dinosaurs were somewhere in between.

Pterosaurs were dinosaurs

We all know about pterosaurs. They became famous thanks to the "Earth before the beginning of time" and "Jurassic Park", only now ... they are not dinosaurs. These reptiles of the Mesozoic era were the first vertebrates, which took off and formed a separate group of animals. The word dinosaurs is commonly used to refer to all antediluvian reptiles, but not all antediluvian reptiles were dinosaurs.

Dinosaurs belong to a very diversea group of terrestrial reptiles that had unique anatomical features. Pterosaurs were flying reptiles and for this reason are excluded. The main feature that distinguishes dinosaurs from other reptiles is their limbs. Unlike antediluvian crocodiles, dinosaur limbs were directly beneath their bodies and allowed them to stand straight.

Brontosaurus does not exist

The first Brontosaurus was documented in the 1870s.years, but in 1903, paleontologists discovered that these fossils actually belonged to an apatosaurus. In the 1970s, brontosaurus fossils were discovered in the western United States. They called the dinosaur Brontosaurus excelsus, a “noble thunderjack”. But later, scientists decided that B. excelsus was so apatosaurus that they renamed it Apatosaurus excelsus.

More recently, a new analysis of fossils,held by Oxford University, restored the Brontosaurus as a genus. This was made possible by modern computer programs that are used to calculate differences between other species and genera of dinosaurs. It turned out that there are quite a few differences between Brontosaurus and Apatosaurus.

The dinosaurs are extinct

Dinosaurs are extinct? Not really. Zauropods and many other groups are really extinct. But one of the eight large groups of dinosaurs, theropods, survived melpaleogen extinction. One of theropod's 40 subgroups survived and became familiar to all of us birds.

It is believed that all dinosaurs became extinct about 65millions of years ago, but thousands of living dinosaur species still live. According to modern systems of evolutionary classification, there is no reason not to consider birds as a species of dinosaurs.

Biologists divide dinosaurs into two large groups -lizardnose and poultry Lizard-like dinosaurs are divided into Sauropodomorpha, which includes long-necked dinosaurs, and Theropoda, which include modern birds and two-legged dinosaurs like Tyrannosaurus rex.

Velociraptor were big dinosaurs

Thanks to Jurassic Park, we all knowvelotsiraptorov, clever scaly dinosaurs who love to sneak up to scared kids. It turns out that the dinosaurs in the film were not real velociraptors (and painted too). In paleontology, as in other sciences, the names are constantly changing. Some dinosaurs different scientists call differently. Some are renamed. Most of the changes are known to specialists, but in one of the rare cases we call a dinosaur differently than paleontologists. The velociraptors in the “Jurassic Park” were completely wrong, and the experts immediately understood this.

Velociraptors were found in Mongolia in the 1920s. They were small predators that grew to 0.5 meters in height and were about 1.8 meters long. It was believed that they killed their prey with a sickle claw on the leg.

When above the "Jurassic Park" was knownOne type of raptor that corresponded to the velociraptor depicted in the film is deynonich. Deinonikha found in the 1960s. It was believed that this is an enlarged version of velociraptor, but their genera differed in many ways. They were twice as long and taller than their Mongol cousins. They had a big crescent-shaped claw on each leg, long paws with tenacious tassels and a powerful tail that helped keep balance while chasing prey. A familiar picture, is not it?

T-Rexs are not seen well

We all remember this “Do not move! He will not see us if we do not move "from" Jurassic Park ". But Tyrannosaurus rex did not have as bad eyesight as we thought. Even if you did not go far, the first sign that T. rex had good eyesight, we see in the frontal setting of the eyes and narrow skull - he had a wonderful sense of depth. And each eye was about the size of a tennis ball.

It was found that the binocular range T. The rex was 55 degrees, which is more than that of a hawk, so this supports basic observations. In addition, other theropods had a binocular range comparable to modern birds of prey. Further studies showed that T. rex had 13 times greater visual clarity than humans. A number of tests showed that T. rex could clearly see some objects at a distance of up to 6 kilometers.

T. rex had useless pens.

Many of us believe that T. rex were relatively small and useless pens, but they are not. Each of the “pens” was very muscular and could probably lift 200 kilos. Evidence of this was found in the forks in the forks (bones) of many Tyrannosaurus rex. These cracks were probably the cause of an incredible fight with other tyrannosaurs.

T. rex could grab the victim's teeth in the throat and strangle her, holding her with his hands. And most likely, it was for hunting that the forelimbs T. rex were used.

Plesiosaurs are dinosaurs too

We all heard about the Loch Ness monster, whichsupposedly a plesiosaur. But many do not know that plesiosaurs were not dinosaurs. Dinosaurs belong to a large group of terrestrial reptiles with unique anatomical features. Like pterosaurs, waterfowl reptiles do not meet all the requirements.

Plesiosaurs had a broad body with a shorttail and length from 2.4 to 14 meters. They had long necks, small heads and big flippers instead of legs. (Other genera of plesiosauroids had large heads and short necks). Flippers were used for quick turning, but they swam slowly. Long necks allowed them to catch prey floating near the surface. On many images, plesiosaurs are shown with their heads sticking out of the water, but they were not capable of that. Even if they could pull their necks out like this, gravity would most likely have turned them off.