Zoom Dinosaurs DINOSAUR QUESTIONS

What does the word dinosaur mean? What does saurus mean?, What does deinos mean?	What color were the dinosaurs?	How (and when) did the dinosaurs go extinct?	How many dinosaurs were there?
What was the biggest dinosaur?	What was the smallest dinosaur?	Which dinosaur was the largest meat-eater?	Were there more plant-eaters or meat-eaters?
How many teeth did T. rex have (and how big were they)?	What is the oldest dinosaur ever found?	What was the first dinosaur ever found?	Did birds evolve from the dinosaurs?
Were there any flying dinosaurs?	Were there any swimming dinosaurs?	How do you know what the enemies of a dinosaur were?	What kind of habitats did the dinosaurs live in?

A: The exact length of most pliosaurs is not known. Some smalll pliosaurs include Leptocleidus (7-10 feet = 2-3 m long), Plesiopleurodon (9.2 feet = 2.9 m long), and Bathyspondylus (7+ feet = 2+ m long).

A: Click here.

A: Velociraptors was a dromaeosaurid, whose intelligence (as measured by its relative brain to body weight, or EQ) was the highest among the dinosaurs. See the chart below:

A: For all the known dinosaurs whose name starts with "A," click here.

A: No one knows.

A: You could write Bush, but I don't that would help much. Towards the top of the dinotalk page, there's a link to add a post that says, "Click here to add to the message board. "

A: Ouranosaurus was a plant-eating dinosaur that had a sail on its back.

A: The dinosaurs ranged in size from very samll to bigger than a house - their feet (and footprints) also varies from very small to about 3 feet long.

A: I have no idea. Click here to see what Dr. Tom Holtz recently said about this.

A: Quite a few dinosaurs have been found in India, including: Antarctosaurus, Barapasaurus, Brachypodosaurus, Coeluroides, Compsosuchus, Dandakosaurus, Dinosaurus, Dravidosaurus*, Dryptosauroides, Himalayecetus*, Indosaurus, Indosuchus, Jubbulpuria, Kotasaurus, Laevisuchus, Lametasaurus, Majungasaurus, Ornithomimoides, Orthogoniosaurus, Titanosaurus, and Walkeria (click on the individual dinosaurs for information on them.

A: The sabertooth cats belonged to the Class Mammalia (mammals), Order Carnivora (cats, dogs, bears, seals, weasels, etc.), Family Felidae (cats), and Subfamily Machairodontinae (sabertooth cats). There were many saber-toothed cats, including Smilodon, Homotherium, Dinictis, and Machairodus. It's relatives today are living members of Family Felidae (cats, like the cheetah).

A: There were many more herbivorous dinosaurs than carnivorous dinosuars. For more information on this, click here.

A: The Permian period (280 to 248 million years ago) came before the Triassic period (248 to 208 million years ago). For a short chart of geologic time, click here.

A: The dinosaurs lived during the Mesozoic Era, which is divided into 3 periods, the Triassic period, the Jurassic period and the Cretaceous period.

A: For a page on fossil formation, click here. Fossils are exposed when erosive forces, like wind or flowing water, abrade the rock and soil matrix that covering the fossil. They are also exposed when people dig into the ground (like in quarries and highway cuts).

A: In the Jurassic Park movies, Dilophosaurus was depicted as spitting poison. There is no evidence that it did this anywhere but in the movies.

A: Only fragments of Spinosaurus have been found so far, and most of them were destroyed during World War 2 (including fragments of the jaws, vertebrae, partial rear legs, teeth [destroyed], and neck vertebra, partial jaws, and a neural arch ), so no one knows exactly how big it was - it may have been longer than Giganotosaurus, but this is not known. Giganotosaurus is known from much more complete fossils.

A: Click here.

A: Australopithecus africanus (found by Raymond Dart) was nicknamed Taung child, since it was perhaps a 3- to 4-year-old child found in the Taung cave, South Africa.

A: The huge, sail-backed dinosaur in JP3 was Spinosaurus. Only fragmentary remains have been found (unfortunately, the skull is also incomplete), so very little is known about Spinosaurus' structure and exact size (and nothing is known about the details of its appearance, like skin color, skin texture, frills, etc.). When you see "realistic" pictures of dinosaurs - beware - they are mostly made up.

As to the shark megalodon, only the jaws have been found - shark skeletons are made of cartlilage, which does not fossilize well at all. Since its teeth are similar to those of the great white shark, paleontologists think that it may have looked like a streamlined version of the great white. If you want a realistic picture of megalodon, you'd better start hunting for some megalodon fossils.

A: The biggest pterodactyloid was Quetzalcoatlus, which had a wingspan of just under 36 feet wide (10.96 m) and weighed about 300 pounds (135 kg) (but Quetzalcoatlus was much bigger than the one pictured in the movie). This enormous pterosaur could probably pick up things up to about its own weight (but this is not at all certain).

A: For early Cretaceous dinosaurs, click here. For middle Cretaceous dinosaurs, click here. For late Cretaceous dinosaurs, click here.

A: Radioisotope dating is based on simple physics, and yes, there is plenty of scientific proof that it is accurate - the rate of decay has been measured innumerable times and is not in dispute. Unstable radioisotopes (radioactive variants of elements) decay into other elements and isotopes at an easily measured (and constant) rate. For more inofrmation on dating fossils, click here.

A: The earliest-known shark remains are fossil scales" that date from about 420 million years ago, during the early Silurian. The earliest shark genera are Mongolepis and Polymerolepis.

A: No dinosaurs have been found in Illinois yet. For a page on dinosaurs listed state by state, click here. For a page on Cretaceous rocks in Illinois, click here.

A: For information on Spinosaurus click here. For a fact sheet on Spinosaurus, click here.

A: Spinosaurus was discovered in Egypt in 1912 (and named in 1915). Spinosaurus and T. rex lived in different places and at different times - they never met in real life, only in the movies. According to Dr. Thomas Holtz (an expert in tyrannosaurids), "Spinosaurus might well have been able to kill T. rex, if it managed to get a good hold of the neck."

A: A recently discovered Pentaceratops skull was 9.8 feet (3 m) long, making it the largest skull of a land animal ever found. Torosaurus, another Ceratopsian with a long frill and the second-largest skull yet found on a land animal.

A: Many organisms survived the K-T extinction, including many birds, many mammals, many reptiles (like lizards and crocodilians, etc.), many worms, marine organisms, etc. During this extinction, 80-90% of marine species, about 50% of the marine genera, and about 15% of the marine families went extinct. For land animals, about 85% of the species, about 25% of the families, and about 56% of the genera died out. Larger animals (over about 55 pounds=25 kg) were all wiped out (and many smaller ones).

A: Apatosaurus and Diplodocus were diplodocids - huge, long-necked, small-headed, whip-tailed plant-eating dinosaurs whose two nostrils opened at the top of the head (with one opening). Some other diplodocids included Seismosaurus, Supersaurus, Barosaurus, and others.

A: Nowhere on this site do we say that Tylosaurus was the largest mosasaur - our page on Mosasaurs states that Tylosaurs were the largest mosasaurs. I've changed the wording to make it clearer. The tylosaurs (a sub-family of mosasaurs) include many genera, including Tylosaurus, Mosasaurus, Hainosaurus, and others.

A: Brontosaurus (now called Apatosaurus) was about 70-90 feet long (21-27 m) and about 15 feet (4.6 m) tall at the hips. It weighed roughly 33-38 tons (30-35 tonnes). Its head was less than 2 feet long.

A: Spinosaurus and T. rex lived in different places and at different times - they never met in real life, only in the movies. According to Dr. Thomas Holtz (an expert in tyrannosaurids), "Spinosaurus might well have been able to kill T. rex, if it managed to get a good hold of the neck."

A: Some of the more obvious differences include:

	GIGANOTOSAURUS carolinii	TYRANNOSAURUS rex
Skull length	6 feet (1.8 m)	5 feet (1.5 m)
Hands	3 fingers	larger, with 2 fingers
Height at hips	12 feet (3.7 m)	10 feet (3 m)
Length	45-47 feet (14.5 m)	40 feet (12 m)
Weight	about 8 tons	about 5 tons
Teeth	long, knife-like, serrated - slicing action	conical, serrated - crushing action
Brain size, shape	small, banana shaped	larger and wider
When they lived	about 100-95 million years ago	about 65 million years ago
Where they lived	South America	North America
Picture

A: No modern-day bird species were around then - in fact, there are no known bird fossils from 165 million years ago. The earliest-known bird, Archaeopteryx, dates from about 150 million years ago (during the late Jurassic period).

A: The paleontologist in the movie "Jurassic Park" was probably based upon the real paleontologist Jack Horner (Horner was also a technical consultant on the film).

A: The dinosaurs that were the most similar to Tyrannosaurus rex were other tyrannosaurids (Family Tyrannosauroidea - huge predators with small arms and two-fingered hands), like Tarbosaurus\, Daspletosaurus, Gorgosaurus, Alioramus, and Shanshanosaurus.

A: Most dinosaurs were plant-eaters (like Brachiosaurus, Triceratops, Apatosaurus, and Maiasaura); far fewer were meat-eaters (like T. rex, Spinosaurus, Compsognathus, and Velociraptor.

A: T. rex was a meat-eater.

A: Click here for a page on Velociraptor.

A: To clone a dinosaur, you'd need intact dinosaur DNA. Although one group of paleontologists claim to have found bits dinosaur genes, bits are not sufficient to re-create an entire animal (and their results are not universally accepted).

A: Dinosaurs lived from about 230 million years ago until 65 million years ago. There are about 1,000 known genera of dinosaurs and many more species. These probably represent only a fraction of the dinosaur genera that actually lived.

A: Dinosaurs have been found all over the world, including the continent of Antarctica. During the Mesozoic Era, when dinosaurs lived, the continents were arranged differently - they were jammed together into a supercontinent called Pangaea, which began to split up during the Jurassic period. For a list of dinosaurs finds by locations, click here.

A: Pterodactyls were flying reptiles that lived during the time of the dinosaurs (although they were related to the dinosaurs, they are not classified as dinosaurs because of their many physical differences, like leg/hip structure).

A: Aristosuchus, Eotyrannus, Hypsilophodon, Ornatotholus, Vectisaurus, and Yaverlandia have been found on the Isle of Wight. For other British and European dinosaurs, click here.

A: Meat-eating dinosaurs killed in order to eat.

A: The largest skull found so far is one from a Pentaceratops - this skull was 9.8 feet (3 m) long, making it the largest skull of a land animal ever found. Until then, the largest skull belonged to Torosaurus (another ceratopsian).

A: For a section on T. rex, click here.

A: Spinosaurus was found in the Baharija Formation, Marsa M., Egypt.

A: There are ALWAYS new discoveries of dinosaur fossils. Some recently-named dinosaur genera include: Citipati, Khaan, Planicoxa, Venenosaurus, Quilmesaurus, Bienosaurus, and Ruehleia.

A: There are about 1,000 known genera of dinosaurs and many more species. These probably represent only a fraction of the dinosaur genera that actually lived. For some species there were probably obvious physical differences in males and females (like crest size or body size), for others, the differences were probably more subtle.

A: No. The last of the terrestrial dinosaurs went extinct about 65 million years ago; Homo sapiens (people) evolved about 200,000 years ago.

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