Throw everything you think you know about dinosaurs out the door. There are many facts out there about dinos that simply aren’t true. We’ve got some of the most fascinating myths about dinosaurs that scientists want you to stop believing.
Dinosaurs are extinct
There are dinosaurs walking around the earth today. Sure, there was a mass extinction of almost all of them 65 million years ago. The birds you see today evolved from dinosaurs. This means they can still be in the same family as the T-rec. It’s like a bat. Bats are mammals that learned to fly. Birds are dinosaurs that learned to adapt to this new life on their own.
The Tyrannosaurus was the king
The T-rex isn’t as tough and cool as everything thinks. He was pretty much a scavenger. He liked to roam around eating dead carcasses instead of hunting his own. The truth is that the Tyrannosaurus didn’t have time to evolve from a scavenger into the biggest dino with spiked teeth that crushed bones. The Tyrannosaurus could definitely hold his own in a fight, but he didn’t go around just eating everything he saw.
There were no mammals in existence with dinosaurs
Mammals actually evolved from the reptile, cynodont. This little fellow looked like a scaly rat. Mammals evolved into the placental and marsupial lines about 165 million years ago. This was during the Jurassic period of dinos. There weren’t any large mammals that lived alongside the dinosaurs. After the dinos that weren’t birds died off, the mammals were able to evolve into much bigger animals.
All dinos were scaly
Some dinosaurs had fluff and feathers. There have been fossils found in China of feather-covered dinos. Some were covered in something called downy fluff. This type of covering would help them regulate body temperature. This would be helpful if you were a smaller animal like a Velociraptor.
Dinosaurs were cold-blooded
Scientists had trouble figuring out why some dinos had some feathers for insulation, yet their body temperature works like a human’s. It’s probably because dinosaurs weren’t like other warm-blooded animals in the form of their metabolism. The microscopic structure of bones show scientists that they grew rapidly, which only animals with well-regulated temperatures can grow at this speed. This means they were not all cold-blooded.
Dinosaurs were green like in cartoons
Dinosaurs weren’t boring in color. Paleontologists have found well-preserved fossilized feathers that are bright in color. Their melanosomes contained different shapes and arrangements of pigments. There may be a small dino that lived in China that had a striped brown tail with a raccoon-like bandit mask.
Tyrannosaurus stood upright
Many scientists first thought that the T-rex stood in an upright position, but they actually held their bodies horizontally. Since the 1960s, scientists have known that the Tyrannosaurus did not stand upright. It is still depicted in media and images as standing this way.