Dinosaurs have been an important part of pop culture for decades, they have been the protagonists of books, movies, video games, children’s television shows, documentaries … but how many of our most popular notions about dinosaurs are scientifically accurate? There are many common myths about dinosaurs and, specifically, a large majority surround the famous Tyrannosaurus Rex, the only species of the genus Tyrannosaurus that lived at the end of the Cretaceous, approximately between 68 and 66 million years ago in what is now North America .
While many of us are familiar with the mass extinction event that occurred at the end of the Cretaceous period 66 million years ago and that wiped out most of the dinosaurs, but not all.
The term “dinosaur” refers to the group of animals that include ornithischians (eg, armored dinosaurs such as Ankylosaurus and Triceratops ) and saurischians (eg, sauropods such as Brachiosaurus and theropods such as Tyrannosaurus rex and Giganotosaurus ). The birds are embedded as belonging to the Maniraptora group, which are theropods. That is, “non-avian dinosaurs” became extinct at the end of the Cretaceous, but “avian dinosaurs” are still with us today, in the form of birds.
Were all dinosaurs as big as they are depicted in books and movies?
Although much of the popular appeal of dinosaurs is based on the fact that they were huge animals (like the impressive Argentinosaurus over 30m long and 50 tonnes in weight or carnivores like the Spinosaurus up to 18 meters tall). long and 20 tons in weight), many dinosaurs were small creatures the size of a hen. Some ornithischians, the group of dinosaurs that includes Triceratops and Stegosaurus, were only about a meter tall (for example, the Kulindadromeus of Siberia).
Theropods, the group of dinosaurs that includes T. rex and modern birds, became progressively smaller over time and in this section we would have to count many very small dinosaurs, weighing less than a bag of jelly beans.
Well-preserved remains of dinosaur skin from around the world show us that dinosaurs had scaly skin, but paleontologists have recognized that many dinosaurs also carried feathers. This paradigm shift is due in large part to the spectacular discoveries of preserved feathers in more than 50 species of dinosaurs from the famous Early Cretaceous fossil beds, with small bird-like dinosaurs like Microraptor and large Tyrannosaurus rex cousins like Yutyrannus .
