15 May: Dinosaur Day

Dinosaurs lived on Earth from about 230 million years ago to about 65 million years ago. They lived during all three periods of the Mesozoic (“middle life”) Era: Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous. Here are ten fascinating dinosaur facts.

1. The word “dinosaur” was coined by British paleontologist Richard Owen in 1842. It's Greek for "terrible lizard". Back then the word "terrible" didn't have exactly the same meaning as it does today. To Owen, it would have meant "awe inspiring." The term refers, officially, to land-dwelling reptiles with a specific hip structure, so many of the creatures commonly believed to be dinosaurs - such as mosasaurs, ichthyosaurs, pterosaurs, plesiosaurs, and Dimetrodon, actually aren't.
2. Not all dinosaurs are big. Some were - they had Skulls as big as a car and tails over 45 feet long. A Tyrannosaurus rex had teeth 6 inches (15 cm) long and ate 22 tons of meat a year; The biggest plant eater was the Argentinosaurus at 98 feet (30m) long, and it would eat a ton of vegetation a day. Most of them were considerably smaller, however. Most were about the same size as a human, or even smaller. The smallest dinosaur skeletons ever found belonged to the young of a creature called Mussaurus (“mouse lizard”) while the smallest fully grown ones were Lesothosaurus (“Lizard from Lesotho”), which is about the size of a Chicken, and Fruitadens haagororum which was only 4 inches (10 cm) tall and weighed less than two pounds. There are animals alive today which are bigger than any dinosaur - the blue whale - which measures 108 feet (33m).
3. Talking of chickens, scientists now believe dinosaurs were more closely related to modern birds than to lizards. The possibility that dinosaurs were the ancestors of birds was first suggested in 1868 by Thomas Henry Huxley. It was discovered that many dinosaurs, including the T. Rex, were actually covered in a type of feather. There are even some studies which suggest that dinosaur DNA lurks, not in insects petrified in amber, but in modern chickens. In 2005, biologists at the University of Wisconsin were able to turn on the gene that controlled the development of teeth, producing a chicken embryo with teeth. Their colleagues at McGill University think it's possible to produce a chicken with little arms.
4. The dinosaur with the longest name is Micropachycephalosaurus (“small thick-headed lizard”).
5. One of the earliest dinosaurs was the Eoraptor (“dawn stealer”), so named because it lived at the dawn of the Dinosaur Age. It was about the size of a German Shepherd Dog.
6. The first to be described in scientific literature was the Megalosaurus. Part of one of its bones was found in a quarry in Oxfordshire in 1676. The bone was passed on to Robert Plot, then Professor of Chemistry at the University of Oxford, who quickly worked out it belonged to an animal bigger than anything alive in Britain. He thought at first it was the thigh-bone of a Roman war Elephant, or a giant human, such as those mentioned in the Bible. While the bone has been lost, Plot made detailed drawings of it, so later scientists could study it, too and identify it as belonging to a Megalosaurus. The bone also gave rise to the first Latin species name given to a dinosaur. Richard Brookes included a picture of it in his 1763 book. In the caption, he called it "Scrotum Humanum". I know what you're thinking, and you're right. Brookes thought the bone looked like a pair of human testicles.
7. Scientists believe that there could be as many as 1,850 different species of dinosaur, many of which haven't been discovered yet. Dinosaurs lived on all the continents, including Antarctica. 108 species of dinosaurs have been discovered in Britain.
8. Like birds and lizards, dinosaurs built nests and laid eggs. It's even thought they took care of their young, as birds do. About 40 kinds of dinosaur eggs have been discovered, ranging in size from 3 centimetres long weighing 75 grams, to those of a meat eater in Asia called segnosaurus (“slow lizard”), around 19 inches long.
9. Scientists disagree about how fast a T. Rex could run. Some say as fast as 18 mph (28 km/h), while others say it was too big to run at all. The fastest dinosaur was the Ornithomimus, which could run up to 43½ mph (70 km/h). That is not as fast as a Cheetah.
10. So what happened to them all? The most common explanation is that a massive Meteorite hit the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico 65.5 million years ago. This is known as the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event, or the K-T event. This killed off anything on land which was bigger than a large dog. Some scientists think it was more gradual - small mammals came along and ate all the dinosaur eggs; the dinosaurs' bodies got too big for their brains (The Stegosaurus, for example, had a body the size of a van, but its brain was the size of a walnut); there was a plague; or it was global warming caused by huge numbers of the massive animals Farting.

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