Dinosaur

Dinosaurs roamed the Earth during the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous eras between about 230 million and 65 million years ago.

Dinosaur bones were first found in Sussex in 1822 when Gideon Mantell found some teeth and bones in Sussex, England. He called it ‘Iguanodon’ (‘iguana tooth’).

On August 2, 1841, English paleontologist Richard Owen coined the word dinosaur during a lecture on fossil reptiles given to a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) in Plymouth. The term derives from Greek δεινός (deinos) "terrible, powerful, wondrous" + "lizard".

By Uploader: User:DrKay Wikipedia Commons

Scientists have no clue how dinosaurs mated, due to their enormous weight, plates, spikes and tails.

The low numbers of injuries in carnivorous dinosaurs indicate they may have been less aggressive with individuals of their own species than modern crocodilians.

The extinct reptile Nyasasaurus is described as the possible oldest known dinosaur from 243-million-year old fossils discovered in Tanzania.

Micropachycephalosaurus, a small herbivore from China, is the dinosaur with the longest name.
The shortest names are Mei and Kol, two feathered dinosaurs from China and Mongolia.

The nine-ton titanosaurus was the heaviest animal that ever walked on land.

The first dinosaur to be given a name was megalosaurus (great lizard) in 1842.

The first evidence of dinosaurs was a tooth dug up by English obstetrician Gideon Mantell in 1822.

The Borogovia, discovered in 1982, was named for Lewis Carroll's borogoves in Jabberwocky. (“All mimsy were the borogoves”.)

The first dinosaur in space was a Maiasaura fossil taken on a space shuttle mission in 1985.

The spiked tail of a stegosaurus didn’t have a scientific name until one was made up in the Far Side comics. Paleontologists loved the joke so much that they began using ‘thagomizer’ formally.

For a long time the smallest known dinosaur was the Fruitadens haagororum, which was only 4 inches (10 cm) tall and weighed less than two pounds, that's about the size of the smallest chihuahua.

In 2020 Paleontologists discovered Oculudentavis, the smallest dinosaur known thus far. The Oculudentavis is known from a complete skull preserved within hardened resin retrieved from 99-million-year-old deposits of the Hukawng Basin in Kachin State, northern Myanmar. The skull of Oculudentavis was only 1.4 centimetres (0.55 in) in length, indicating that the animal would have been comparable in size to the modern bee hummingbird.

The biggest known dinosaur is Dreadnoughtus, which was 130 feet long and about 65 feet tall, and weighed 65 tons. It was discovered in 2005 in Argentina.

According to the Guinness Book of World Records, The 'Tallest dinosaur skeleton mounted', is a 13.27 m (43 ft 6 in) tall Brachiosaurus brancai, which can be found in the Natural History Museum of Berlin.

Scientists announced on April 29, 2015, the discovery of the first known dinosaur with membranous wings, Yi qi. The first and only known fossil specimen of Yi qi was found by a farmer, Wang Jianrong, in a quarry near Mutoudeng Village (Qinglong County, Hebei) in China ). Wang sold the fossil to the Shandong Tianyu Museum of Nature. The initial study of Yi was published in the journal Nature.

Restoration of the membrane-winged scansoriopterygid Yi qi. By Emily Willoughby, Wikipedia Commons

The title of most expensive dinosaur specimen and fossil ever sold belongs to Stan the Tyrannosaurus rex. This magnificent beast fetched a whopping $31.8 million at Christie's New York auction in October 2020, shattering the previous record held by Sue, another T. rex, which sold for $8.36 million in 1997. It's 70% complete and is the fifth most complete T-Rex fossil ever discovered.

Velociraptors were feathered, weighed less than a human three-year-old, and looked like little, long-tailed chickens.

The four-ton Stegosaurus was equipped with an unusually small brain, comparable to that of a modern Golden Retriever.

Male stegosauruses had wide, ornamental back plates to impress females, while females had spiny, tall back plates to deter predators.

Tyrannosaurus Rex had eyes that were 13 times as precise as a human's eyesight, meaning it could see prey from almost four miles (six kilometers) away.

A Tyrannosaurus Rex would barely outrun a professional soccer player, reaching an all-out speed of 18 mph.

Dinosaurs didn’t roar; they mumbled or cooed.

Most dinosaurs walked on their toes.

Scientists discovered a dinosaur tail perfectly preserved in amber. It belongs to a young coelurosaurian - from the same group of dinosaurs as the predatory velociraptors and the tyrannosaurus. The creature had a whip-like tail like a mouse, which was covered with feathers similar to those that give shape to birds.

In 1982, the comic The Far Side jokingly referred to the set of spikes on a Stegosaurus's tail on a cartoon as a "thagomizer". A paleontologist who read the comic realized there wasn't any official name for the spikes and began using the new word; Thagomizer is now the generally accepted term.

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Some dinosaurs had a possible lifespan of 300 years due to their slow metabolisms

The dinosaurs became extinct before the Rockies or the Alps were formed.

If Jurassic Park was real, it would cost an estimated $11,907,000,000 a year to maintain.

The puppeteers who animated the raptors in Jurassic Park had to take a six-week-long class on how to move like a dinosaur.

The only dinosaurs in Jurassic Park that lived in the Jurassic era was brachiosaurus. All the others all from the later Cretaceous period.

Tyrannosaurus rex and Brachiosaurus, both depicted in Jurassic Park, existed further apart from each other in time than humans do to T. Rex. The time gap between the existence of Tyrannosaurus Rex and Brachiosaurus is estimated to be around 90 million years, while the time gap between the extinction of Tyrannosaurus Rex and the appearance of modern humans is estimated to be around 65 million years.. 

Recordings of an angry goose, mating tortoises and a Jack Russell playing with a toy were all used to help create the dinosaur noises in Jurassic Park.

Source Daily Express