Post Your Dinosaur Trivia

[Acton Hank]

Tyrannosaurus Rex was not the largest land carnivore that ever lived.

That title goes to Spinosaurus Aegyptiacus, followed closely by Carcharodontosaurus Saharicus then Giganotosaurus Carolinii and finally Tyrannosaurus Rex.

And there aren't enough video games with Dinosaurs.

 

[CAPTCHA]

I've got another.

Iguanodon was origionaly put together wrong and it was thought to resemble a large Iguana:

It wasn't untill much later that the remains were built in the correct way that we got the dinosaur we know today:

 

[cojo965]

From some documentary I watched:
Ceraptopsians such as Torosaurus most likely couldn't charge like a bull the way they are sometimes depicted. Weight aside, the structure of their skulls wasn't all that tough, and could suffer fatal damage in a high speed collision. Instead they would have held their ground, using their horns in a shield and spear type attack. A simple flick of their head could gore a large predator, while the frill would have made a good bite to the head or neck very difficult to inflict.

And from my own research:
Another thing is that the asteroid impact that supposedly wiped out the dinosaurs was likely just the final blow to an already dying subclass. Aside from the impact, the Deccan traps eruptions were already wreaking havoc with the global climate, and the dinosaurs were failing to adapt. In the Hell Creek formation in Montana, the number of dinosaur species fell from around 30 species about 7 million years before K/T, to only 12 at the time of the impact. And of course, there were dinosaur fossils recorded after K/T as well, but these were just the animals that didn't die in the cataclysm, and if I recall correctly, no fossils have been found past 0.3 million years after the impact.

This was fun! Its rare that I get to use what I've learned in college on the Escapist.

Actually, look up the horned dinosaurs and then look up what Tyrannosaur shared the region and ask yourself, "Could its skull take the force of the local Tyrannosaur's bite?" The answer a number of times may come up as "no." In fact, it was only Triceratops that had developed a frill that could take a Tyranosaur's bite, namely the one and only T. Rex. It would seem that for a number of the horned dinosaurs the goal was to look bigger than they actually were.

 

[Verkula]

There is evidence that suggest that the T-Rex may have been a scavenger, instead of hunting their own food.

Theres also just as many evidence that it wasnt, so im not sure we will ever know.

 

[CAPTCHA]

Factoid the third: they've only ever found a single female T-rex. The usual method of sexing a T-rex is to look at the skeleton and see if it either 'robust' of 'gracial', the robust being the female. The method has been put into doubt however. Since T-rex are quite common and can be found in several locations around the world, each local offering different bone structures, it can be assumed that t-rex physiology is extreamly mutable. Combine this with the fact that older T-rex tend towards the robust structure and you can see why there is doubt regarding sexing the species. The single female, named 'B-rex', that I mentioned could only be sexed because it was found with traces of calcium that related to egg producion on the remains which suggest that it died during ovulation. The rest of the remains were not enough to correctly draw comparison to other skeletons however, so sexing remains a mystery.

Spoiler: Awww Yeahhhh

Can you feel... the love... tonight.

 

[Random berk]

From some documentary I watched:
Ceraptopsians such as Torosaurus most likely couldn't charge like a bull the way they are sometimes depicted. Weight aside, the structure of their skulls wasn't all that tough, and could suffer fatal damage in a high speed collision. Instead they would have held their ground, using their horns in a shield and spear type attack. A simple flick of their head could gore a large predator, while the frill would have made a good bite to the head or neck very difficult to inflict.

And from my own research:
Another thing is that the asteroid impact that supposedly wiped out the dinosaurs was likely just the final blow to an already dying subclass. Aside from the impact, the Deccan traps eruptions were already wreaking havoc with the global climate, and the dinosaurs were failing to adapt. In the Hell Creek formation in Montana, the number of dinosaur species fell from around 30 species about 7 million years before K/T, to only 12 at the time of the impact. And of course, there were dinosaur fossils recorded after K/T as well, but these were just the animals that didn't die in the cataclysm, and if I recall correctly, no fossils have been found past 0.3 million years after the impact.

This was fun! Its rare that I get to use what I've learned in college on the Escapist.

Actually, look up the horned dinosaurs and then look up what Tyrannosaur shared the region and ask yourself, "Could its skull take the force of the local Tyrannosaur's bite?" The answer a number of times may come up as "no." In fact, it was only Triceratops that had developed a frill that could take a Tyranosaur's bite, namely the one and only T. Rex. It would seem that for a number of the horned dinosaurs the goal was to look bigger than they actually were.

The frill might not have been strong enough to withstand the full force of the appropriate tyrannosaur's bite, but with the angle it was set at, the spines around the edge, and the fact that the animal would still be trying to gore its predator, the frill would surely have made biting the Ceratopsian an awkward, cumbersome act.
Certainly the frill was probably intended as a display either for threat or sex appeal, as many of these large and impressive bone structures were, but I imagine it could have provided at least some additional defence against an attack even if that wasn't its main purpose.

 

[BrassButtons]

I'm friends with a paleontologist--I'll have to get him in here

Dinosaurs didn't go extinct. Modern birds are dinosaurs, at least according to some systems of taxonomy.

Dinosaurs had two basic hip structures: bird-hipped, and another I forget. The bird-hipped ones are the ones who died off, and the non-bird-hipped ones evolved into birds.

Lizard-hipped.

Right, thanks. Feel kinda silly for forgetting something so obvious

This one isn't a dinosaur, but Megaladon had two sets of jaws, with the inner jaws acting like a conveyor to pull food down their throat.

 

[DugMachine]

The T-rex was a giant chicken basically. Okay not true but I know jack about dinosaurs

 

[bojackx]

Tyrannosaurus Rex was not the largest land carnivore that ever lived.

That title goes to Spinosaurus Aegyptiacus, followed closely by Carcharodontosaurus Saharicus then Giganotosaurus Carolinii and finally Tyrannosaurus Rex.

And there aren't enough video games with Dinosaurs.

Damn, that was going to be what I said.

All I can think of (which is only tangentially related) is that we will never be able to clone dinosaurs since all DNA will have probably decayed which have a half life too small to survive all this time.

 

[AngloDoom]

Every zombie videogame ever would be better if they made it into a dinosaur apocalypse.

This is cold hard fact.

 

[Dinwatr]

I'm BrassButton's paleontologist friend.

Here are a few of my favorite dinosaurs:

1) Sue. I saw her come out of the rock, and I've been in love ever sense.

2) Therizinosauroidea. Imagine a T. rex with scythes as claws. What hope have mammals but for the mercy of the reaper-dino? We don't know why they had them, either. Speculation abounds, including speculation that they used their claws to eat termites (I find that argument HIGHLY dubious--these things weren't small, and it'd take a few trillion termites to make a good meal for them).

3) Heterodontosauridae. I was introduced to these via a paper Paul Sereno did earlier this year, and that was one of the times I've just stared, unable to assimilate the data. Honestly, if an Elder God had stopped me in the street and asked for directions I'd have been less surprised. These things had canines and teeth that look for all the world like horse teeth. I still can't figure out why (and neither can anyone else). Right now, the best guess is that they used them sort of like pigs, to root around and rip into things.

Fun trivia: T. rexes had the strongest bite pressure of anything ever measured. They also had teeth that were banana-shaped and which had serrations that captured muscle fibers and other animal bits. That means that not only did they have a bit that could turn your bones to shrapnel, they'd also infect you with all sorts of fun diseases when they did so. The conclusion for hunting behavior is obvious: they'd ambush prey, bite hard and fast, then back up and wait.

The chicken thing is Jack Horner's pet project these days. And it's not chickens, it's emus. Basically, he's playing with the genetic code to re-activate genes that were shut down (for various reasons), giving emus long tails, claws, scales, teeth, and all the other accoutrements of Therapoda. As an aside, I've got an uncle that used to raise emus. He has thus far refused to allow me to put one of these on his farm.

The whole Ceratopsian line is currently one giant snarl, and it's actually cast some doubt as to dinosaur taxonomy (the finer points, at least). Paleontologists recently realized that what they'd been calling different species were actually different ontological stages--essentially, they were saying puppies and dogs were two different species! They figured this out through analysis of bone growth patterns, something that's not hard to do physically (you make a thin section of the bone, then look at it under a microscope--standard stuff), but which is nearly impossible from an administrative perspective (NO ONE wants to let ANYONE cut up dinosaur bones). So we're sort of waiting to see the fallout of all that.

I recently heard about evidence for Triceratops heads being ripped off their bodies. Apparently T. rexes would grab their neck frill and pop the head off like an old-school beer tab. Haven't gotten ahold of the original paper yet, but I can only imagine that this only occurred after a sufficient period of deterioration--it's VERY hard to rip something's head off!

I actually spent a few years studying the K/Pg mass extinction. It's one of two mass die-off style mass extinctions, with elevated extinction rates but steady or reduced origination rates (the other option is for both to be elevated, which I call mass turn-over style mass extinctions). Studying that extinction ushered in a new sedimentological paradigm: neocatastraphism, which argues that low-amplitude, high-frequency events are typically overwritten in the geological record by high-amplitude, low-frequency events. A great example is a beach: one storm can re-work a few tens of feet of sediment into a single tempestite, basically wiping out a few hundred years of sedimentary features. (I mean no offense here--I know that the devastation from Sandy is ongoing. This is the classic example, nothing more.) And contrary to what you'll hear, there's no actual evidence that dinosaurs were in decline leading up to the impact event. Basically, the reason it looks like there is is because 1) most paleontologists don't pay adequate attention to highly degraded bone or stratigraphic position, and 2) when you have events on a line with randomly-sized gaps, you can stop the line anywhere and it will always give you the appearance of a gradual decline. It's called the Signor-Lipps Effect. Peter Ward did some research on various organisms as they approached the K/Pg boundary back in the '90s, and found that pretty much universally they were doing fine up until the rock hit us. Then everything went to Hell.

One of my most prized possessions is "The Dinosauria", second edition. It's a book that's about five inches thick, and basically gives the state of dinosaur research up until 2004. And I mean "dinosaur research"--EVERYTHING. It devotes page after page to the most god-awful boring anatomical descriptions of bones you've ever seen, everything from the skulls to the wrist and ankle bones. $50 at Barns & Noble. It's a prized possession because it's taken me 23 years to get to the point where I can understand it enough to justify owning it. There have been a lot of nights when I've just stayed up reading those god-awful anatomical descriptions of bones. I highly, HIGHLY recommend this book to anyone who's interested in dinosaurs. It's become my go-to resource (with, of course, marginalia discussing updates since it's nearly a decade old now ).

 

[Acton Hank]

Tyrannosaurus Rex was not the largest land carnivore that ever lived.

That title goes to Spinosaurus Aegyptiacus, followed closely by Carcharodontosaurus Saharicus then Giganotosaurus Carolinii and finally Tyrannosaurus Rex.

And there aren't enough video games with Dinosaurs.

Damn, that was going to be what I said.

All I can think of (which is only tangentially related) is that we will never be able to clone dinosaurs since all DNA will have probably decayed which have a half life too small to survive all this time.

That was on the news section of this site a couple of weeks back.

Sad, sad day...

 

[Loonyyy]

Longest Dino name (According to one of the numerous Dino books I overread as a child).

Micropachycephalasaurus. It was also one of the smallest. Troll naming, anyone?

 

[Twilight_guy]

Dimetrodon is considered a mammal-like lizard and is noted as one of the earliest steps towards the evolution of mammals.

 

[Dinwatr]

Tyrannosaurus Rex was not the largest land carnivore that ever lived.

That title goes to Spinosaurus Aegyptiacus, followed closely by Carcharodontosaurus Saharicus then Giganotosaurus Carolinii and finally Tyrannosaurus Rex.

And there aren't enough video games with Dinosaurs.

Damn, that was going to be what I said.

All I can think of (which is only tangentially related) is that we will never be able to clone dinosaurs since all DNA will have probably decayed which have a half life too small to survive all this time.

That was on the news section of this site a couple of weeks back.

Sad, sad day...

Actually, this doesn't preclude cloning, it only complicates it.

DNA will almost certainly break randomly (the test is Broken Stick Analysis, if anyone is good enough at stats to run it). If that's true, we can take the broken fragments, match up matching sections, and re-construct the whole code. This isn't novel--we do it all the time in dendocrhonology and magnetostratigraphy. Obviously the longer the identical segment, the better the match (one nucleotide tells us nothing; at 500 we can be pretty darn confident we have a match). So really, all we need to do is get a bunch of those fragments, analyze how they match up, and find a way to construct the resultant DNA strands (there will inevitably be multiple, given the nature of genetics, and running multiples will allow us to see which are dinosaurs and which are failures).

We can also test individual genes. Japanese researchers recently tested a single gene from mammoths, proving that they could manufacture what amounts to an antifreeze in their blood. So we don't even need the full DNA strand--we can test each individual gene before we accept that we got it right.

It's a lot of trial and error, but still well within the realm of plausibility.

 

[Dinwatr]

Dimetrodon is considered a mammal-like lizard and is noted as one of the earliest steps towards the evolution of mammals.

Technically, it's a pelicasaur. Which led to a favorite quote in my family: "If I wanted a freaking pelicasaur I'd have ASKED for a freaking pelicasaur!"

That pretty much tells you all you need to know about my family.

 

[NinjaDeathSlap]

They died, so that is mammals could live.

Spoiler: Never forget

There is evidence that suggest that the T-Rex may have been a scavenger, instead of hunting their own food.


I don't believe that though.

We wouldn't call a scavenger the King of the Dinosaurs...

[sub]Would we?[/sub]

Well, I doubt the distinction is all that clear cut. T-Rex was certainly more than capable of killing it's own food, especially since they often hunted in two's and three's. However, I doubt a hungry T-Rex would have been fussy about whether it's prey was still breathing or not when it found it. There were no restaurants, larders or fridge-freezers in the Cretaceous. You had to eat what you could, when you could, because you didn't know when you'd next get the chance to feed, and T-Rex in particular would have needed to eat a lot.

 

[Mr Dizazta]

Dracorex hogwartsia(the dinosaur that looks like a dragon) is said to be a juvenile Pachycephalosaurus

 

[Dinwatr]

They died, so that is mammals could live.

Spoiler: Never forget

There is evidence that suggest that the T-Rex may have been a scavenger, instead of hunting their own food.


I don't believe that though.

We wouldn't call a scavenger the King of the Dinosaurs...

[sub]Would we?[/sub]

Well, I doubt the distinction is all that clear cut. T-Rex was certainly more than capable of killing it's own food, especially since they often hunted in two's and three's. However, I doubt a hungry T-Rex would have been fussy about whether it's prey was still breathing or not when it found it. There were no restaurants, larders or fridge-freezers in the Cretaceous. You had to eat what you could, when you could, because you didn't know when you'd next get the chance to feed, and T-Rex in particular would have needed to eat a lot.

It's been speculated that T. rex followed Hadrosaur migration routes, so this may not have been true--meals were probably fairly regular for them (relatively speaking--I believe carnivore success rates are around 5% in a typical ecosystem, and T. rexes were probably a bit higher). That said, I agree that they probably straddled the line between hunter and scavenger. Their infectious bite makes pure scavenging impossible (and one herpitologist I spoke to about this got rather rude on that subject), but it also means that they could handle a bit of flesh-eating bacteria, so a half-rotten carcass would be a lot more appealing to them than to us, with our weak and easily-overwhelmed digestive systems.

Let's face it--when you're in the top 5 largest meat-eaters on a continent you eat what you want, living or dead. And when you can bite through bone the way we bite through bread crust all that matters is that it's meat.

All that said, T. rexes has a somewhat unique dental structure that indicated at least sometimes the prey got away. Mature cheek-teeth (technically the post-maxillary teeth) always had immature teeth in the wings, so if the rex broke a tooth another would automatically grow in place. Makes estimations of carnivore density a pain--osteophagy (eating bone) is an indicator of carnivore density, and dental wear is a proxy for how much bone is eaten. If your teeth constantly replenish you can't tell, because no tooth is overly worn down. I've spent a fair bit of time tilting at THAT particular windmill. Pleasant time, but ultimately unproductive.

 

[Nexxis]

There is a carnivorous spinosaur named Irritator because the fossil hunter that found its skull artificially elongated the snout which had to be undone. This meant a lot of tedious and "irritating" work.