Dinosaurs were already strange enough when all we knew were the skeletons. But the more paleontologists dig, the weirder the story gets. These 50 facts cover everything from fossil lawsuits and dragon-bone medicine to four-winged predators, dinosaur eggs worshipped in India, and the dinosaur names that scientists had to bring back from the dead. If you missed the start of the series, check out Part 1 here
1 Brontosaurus Won Its Name Back
For years, people were told that Brontosaurus was not a real dinosaur and that it was just Apatosaurus under the wrong name. Then in 2015, researchers argued that Brontosaurus and Apatosaurus were actually different enough to be separate dinosaurs. That brought Brontosaurus back from scientific exile and made one of the most famous dinosaur names valid again. Some paleontologists still disagree, but Brontosaurus is no longer treated as just a simple mistake.
2. When crews dug the site for Coors Field in Denver in 1993, they uncovered small dinosaur bone fragments during construction. Scientists identified one of the finds as part of a rib from a horned dinosaur, likely something like Triceratops. The discovery became such a local story that the Colorado Rockies leaned into it when they created their mascot. That is why the team ended up with Dinger, a purple triceratops, instead of a more ordinary baseball character.
3. In 2002, a crew taking part in a simulated Mars mission in the Utah desert went out on a mock spacewalk near the Mars Desert Research Station. During that exercise, they came across a real dinosaur fossil while exploring terrain meant to stand in for the surface of Mars.
4. In the late 1800s, American paleontologists Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh became bitter rivals in what later became known as the Bone Wars. As they raced to uncover dinosaurs in the American West, they bribed workers, stole information, tried to ruin each other’s careers, and sometimes destroyed fossils to keep the other man from getting them. The feud burned through their money and wrecked both of them financially by the end. But for all the chaos, their rivalry helped uncover more than 140 dinosaur species and pushed dinosaur hunting into the public spotlight.
5. In the United States, dinosaur fossils found on private land usually belong to the landowner, which means a fossil in your own backyard can legally be yours. But the law changes once fossils turn up on federal land, where vertebrate fossils are protected and usually cannot be collected without a permit.
6 Apex Became Auction Record Holder
In July 2024, a mostly complete Stegosaurus skeleton nicknamed Apex went up for auction at Sotheby’s in New York. The fossil sold for $44.6 million, making it the most expensive fossil ever sold at auction, and billionaire Kenneth C. Griffin later emerged as the buyer. Apex earned that attention partly because it is the largest known Stegosaurus specimen and is remarkably complete, with 254 preserved bones out of about 319. After the sale, the fossil did not disappear into storage, and it later went on public display at the American Museum of Natural History.
7. Dinosaurs lived for such a huge stretch of time that the earliest ones died and entered the fossil record long before the last ones appeared. Non-bird dinosaurs were around from about 245 million years ago to 66 million years ago, which gave nature plenty of time to bury, preserve, and expose older remains while dinosaurs still walked the Earth.
8. The Borealopelta dinosaur was discovered in Alberta, Canada, after a miner struck the fossil at an oil sands mine in 2011. When paleontologists recovered it, they found far more than bones: its armor was still in life position, parts of its skin survived, and even stomach contents from its last meal remained inside the body. The fossil looked so complete and lifelike that researchers described it more like a mummy than an ordinary dinosaur fossil.
9. A lot of prehistoric ocean animals get called dinosaurs, but the big ones that ruled ancient seas were actually different kinds of reptiles. Creatures like ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, and mosasaurs lived in the water while dinosaurs dominated the land, which is why museums separate marine reptiles from dinosaurs. That means the classic “ocean dinosaurs” never really existed in the way people imagine them.
10. A lot of dinosaurs will never be found because fossil discovery depends on the right kind of preservation, not just on whether an animal once existed. If a species lived in places where bodies were quickly destroyed by erosion or mountain building instead of being buried in sediment, its remains had little chance of surviving for millions of years. That means some highly specialized dinosaurs may have lived in habitats that simply did not preserve them well enough for us to identify today.
11 Tyrannosaurus rex Teenage Growth Spurt
For years, paleontologists thought a teenage Tyrannosaurus rex went through an extreme growth spurt as it raced toward adult size. Studies based on growth rings in fossil bones suggested that young T. rex could pack on about 35 to 45 pounds a week during adolescence. That made the animal seem like a giant predator that shot up to full size in a surprisingly short time. But newer research published in 2026 suggests T. rex may have grown more slowly and stayed in its subadult stage much longer than scientists once believed.
12. A 2009 study found that some tyrannosaur fossils carried a strange set of holes in the jawbone that looked a lot like the damage caused by trichomonosis in living birds. When researchers surveyed tyrannosaurid specimens, they found these lesions in nearly 15% of the individuals they examined. The infection likely attacked the mouth and throat, and in severe cases it may have left the animals unable to eat and slowly starved them. Modern birds of prey, including falcons and hawks, can suffer similar trichomonosis infections, which is why scientists think the disease has very deep roots in the dinosaur-bird family line.
13. People often say dinosaurs evolved into birds, but paleontologists usually frame it a little differently: birds are dinosaurs that survived. They belong inside the theropod branch, in the same broad dinosaur lineage that also produced predators like Tyrannosaurus rex. More specifically, bird ancestry sits within Maniraptora, a subgroup inside Coelurosauria. So dinosaurs did not vanish completely at the end of the Cretaceous, because one branch of them is still flying around today.
14. In 1995, a 3-year-old boy named David Shiffler was digging in the dirt in New Mexico with his toy backhoe when he spotted what he thought was a dinosaur eggshell. His father did not believe him at first and answered with a shrug, but the family kept the strange piece anyway. Scientists later confirmed that the fragment came from a real dinosaur egg from the Jurassic Period, found in the Rio Puerco Valley west of Albuquerque.
15. Before the asteroid impact explanation took hold in the 1980s, scientists floated some truly strange ideas to explain why dinosaurs vanished. In 1925, paleobotanist George Wieland suggested that Tyrannosaurus rex may have eaten so many eggs that dinosaurs wiped out their own last generation before it could hatch. Then in 1939, paleontologist Percy Raymond proposed that dinosaur brains had shrunk over time until the animals became too stupid to survive. Those theories eventually collapsed, and the impact hypothesis rose instead after 1980, when new evidence tied the extinction to a massive extraterrestrial strike.
16 Hadrosaur Survived Tyrannosaurus rex Bite
Paleontologists found a pair of hadrosaur tail vertebrae with a Tyrannosaurus rex tooth still stuck inside them. The bone had healed around the tooth, which means the hadrosaur was alive when it was bitten and survived the attack long enough for new bone to grow.
17. The Jurassic Park movie turned Velociraptor into a tall, scaly super-predator, but the real animal was much smaller. Paleontologists describe it as roughly turkey-sized, and fossil evidence shows it carried feathers on its arms.
18. In 1987, a farmer near Plaza Huincul, Argentina, noticed a huge bone sticking out of the ground on his land. That discovery led paleontologists to excavate the site, and the remains were later named Argentinosaurus in 1993. The animal turned out to be a colossal sauropod, so large that scientists still rank it among the biggest land animals ever known. Even now, its size is so extreme that researchers still argue over whether it was merely one of the largest or the largest of them all.
19. About 110 million years ago, the Nigersaurus dino lived in what is now Niger and fed close to the ground with a broad, unusual mouth. Its jaws carried more than 500 teeth arranged in dense rows, and fresh replacements stacked beneath the working teeth so the mouth could keep functioning even as the front teeth wore down. Researchers later estimated that each tooth could be replaced in as little as 14 days, giving Nigersaurus one of the fastest known tooth replacement rates in any dinosaur.
20. Crocodiles and alligators are the surviving branch of an older archosaur family tree that once included many powerful Triassic reptiles. During the late Triassic, crocodile-line archosaurs, or pseudosuchians, filled major roles on land and included predators, armored herbivores, and other strange forms. Then a mass extinction near the end of the Triassic wiped out most of them and opened the way for dinosaurs to take over as the dominant large land animals. The crocodilian branch survived the collapse.
15 Most Controversial & Costly Blunders in History
21 Brontomerus Earned Thunder Thighs Name
In 2011, paleontologists named a dinosaur from Utah Brontomerus, a name that literally means “thunder thighs.” They gave it that name because its unusual hip bone suggested it had extremely large thigh muscles for a sauropod. That made Brontomerus stand out as one of the strangest long-necked dinosaurs ever described. But because the fossils are so incomplete, some later scientists argued the dinosaur may be too fragmentary to classify with confidence.
22. Chinese paleontologist Xu Xing became one of the most prolific dinosaur researchers in the world by describing new species at a staggering pace. The Natural History Museum says he has named more dinosaurs than any other living paleontologist, and Xu himself has estimated that the total is somewhere around 80 species. His discoveries range across major dinosaur groups and helped reshape how scientists think about the evolution of birds and feathered dinosaurs in China. He named so many new species, in fact, that even he stopped keeping an exact count.
23. As paleontologists found more fossils, they realized that some dinosaurs changed so much as they grew that juveniles and adults could look like completely different animals. That led researchers to revisit old names and argue that a few supposed species were really just different life stages of the same dinosaur. The idea became especially famous in debates over animals like Torosaurus and Triceratops, where growth and bone changes may have confused the original classifications.
24. About 66 million years ago, the Chicxulub asteroid struck one of the worst possible places on Earth: a shallow-water region rich in sulfur-bearing rocks in what is now the Yucatán Peninsula. That target mattered because the impact blasted huge amounts of dust, soot, and sulfur into the atmosphere, cutting off sunlight and helping trigger the mass extinction that killed the non-bird dinosaurs. Scientists have argued that if the asteroid had arrived a little later, even by 30 seconds, it would have hit deeper water, and it may have thrown less of that deadly material into the air and caused a less extreme global disaster.
25. Many U.S. states have chosen an official state fossil as part of their state identity. Colorado, for example, picked Stegosaurus stenops, the plated Jurassic dinosaur closely tied to fossils found in the American West. Other states chose everything from mammoths and trilobites to dinosaur tracks and petrified wood.
RE: Fact #22 (Xu Xing Lost Count Naming Dinosaurs) – I love that he was assigned to paleontology by the government despite knowing absolutely nothing about dinosaurs until college.
RE: Fact #3 (Mock Mars Walk Found Fossil) – Utah has so many amazing things to find! You just have to be willing to spend a long time there to actually find them.
RE: Fact #9 (Sea Reptiles Weren’t Dinosaurs) – People are going to be shocked when they find out that pterosaurs weren’t dinosaurs either.
RE: Fact #10 (Some Dinosaurs Left No Fossils) – It is a similar issue with human history. We really only know about civilizations that lived in dry climates or used materials like stone that could survive the elements. We know very little about the rest of the world because they built with wood or clay.
So many unknown gods, lost rituals, and temples turned to dust. Countless stories, heroes, battles, and dynasties have vanished. All the beautiful art, clever craftsmanship, and early scientific discoveries are gone, nothing left but whispers in the shadow of time.
RE: Fact #6 (Apex Became Auction Record Holder) – That guy lied in a congressional hearing and is a financial criminal. Nobody likes him.
He’s a joke and honestly deserves to be in prison.
RE: Fact #10 (Some Dinosaurs Left No Fossils) – The T-Rex was around for 3.6 million years, and experts estimate there were about 20, 000 of them on Earth at any given time. We have only discovered 40 individual T-Rex fossils, which shows just how rare those fossils actually are.
The 20, 000 estimate is the part that gets me. I assumed the number would be much higher, but I guess I also just figured they were spread out all over the planet.
Keep in mind that many of those statistics are actually just guesses. There is not enough evidence left to be certain about almost anything, which is why those estimates swing wildly depending on who you ask. Think about how they could possibly calculate those populations; most of the models are built on speculation using very limited data.
Also, apex predators are just less common. It is the same reason there are way more deer than wolves, there is just less room at the top of the food chain.
RE: Fact #2 (Dinger Started With Dinosaur Bones) – The team went with purple because it, along with teal, was a massive trend for sports teams in the 90s. Think of the Diamondbacks, Devil Rays, Ravens, Raptors, Mighty Ducks, and Coyotes.
RE: Fact #18 (Argentinosaurus Began With One Bone) – It’s such a coincidence that the Argentinosaurus was actually found in Argentina.
It’s no weirder than Lou Gehrig getting Lou Gehrig’s disease. Man, I need to watch The Sopranos again.
RE: Fact #1 (Brontosaurus Won Its Name Back) – This needs some clarification. Even when they were considered the same, they were always viewed as two different animals. To see why, we have to look at how scientific naming works. Animals get a genus and a species name. For humans, it’s Homo sapiens, but since there’s only one species in our genus, we don’t always use the full name. It’s like the word ‘Panthera’ for big cats; it includes lions, tigers, and leopards, but we use common names to tell them apart because the genus doesn’t help much. With dinosaurs, we usually just use the genus name, like ‘Allosaurus’ instead of ‘Allosaurus fragilis.’ So even if you had two closely related animals, you’d likely call them the same thing. In 1877, O. Charles Marsh found a juvenile he named Apatosaurus ajax, and in 1879, he found a larger, complete one he called Brontosaurus excelsus. He even guessed what its head looked like based on a different species. In 1903, Elmer Riggs decided they were closely related enough to share the same genus, Apatosaurus, and that stuck for a century. If museums hadn’t kept the ‘Brontosaurus’ label on displays, it would have been forgotten. Now, we use computers for classification, which helps us stay consistent. A recent study compared sauropods and found that Apatosaurus ajax and Apatosaurus excelsus are actually quite different. They have enough physical differences that they shouldn’t be the same genus at all. They’re more like the difference between lions and cheetahs than lions and tigers. That’s why Brontosaurus is valid again. I’m simplifying, as there are a few species for each genus, but the main point is that paleontologists are splitting them up again based on these criteria.
I’m a paleontologist, and this explanation is spot on. Thanks for taking the time to break it down!
RE: Fact #20 (Crocodile Relatives Ruled Before Dinosaurs) – They were incredibly diverse. Some were herbivores, others could gallop. There’s just so much to learn if you start looking into them.
There was even one that lived entirely in the water with flippers, kind of like a whale.
RE: Fact #4 (Bone Wars Built Dinosaur Fame) – They even invented new species just so one of them could claim to have found the largest one, if I remember correctly.
Like the Brontosaurus, right? That one though turned out to be a real dinosaur after all.
RE: Fact #30 (Pterodactyls Were Never Dinosaurs) – Fun fact: the “pter” prefix means wing, and “saur” means lizard. It is the same “pter” used in helicopter, where “helico” means spiral. So it should really be helico-pter, not heli-copter.
RE: Fact #17 (Velociraptor Was A Feathered Turkey) – I think people forget how brutal Canadian geese are. I’ve seen one chase off a Rottweiler, and if a goose can terrify me while I’m running for my life, I bet a turkey-sized raptor would have no problem taking me down.
RE: Fact #25 (States Turned Fossils Into Symbols) – How is it that we have fossils of saber-toothed tigers, yet our state fossil is just a clam?
RE: Fact #35 (Tyrannosaurus rex Poop Broke Records) – The largest human poop fossil was about 20 cm, so T. rex definitely has us beat. Of course, their poop had 65 million years to decay first.
RE: Fact #14 (David Shiffler Found Dinosaur Eggshell) – Scientists calling this find major because of how rare Jurassic-era eggs are makes the story pretty cool!
RE: Fact #5 (Your Backyard Dinosaur Is Yours) – My HOA requires six-foot privacy fences for this exact reason. Dinosaurs kept wandering into yards and people were trying to claim them. Bill, who lives two doors down, had two Stegosauruses and a T-Rex before the HOA stepped in. Such killjoys. The best I ever managed to get was an Archaeopteryx, but people always mistake it for a bird, which kind of ruins the fun of having a dinosaur.
The joke’s on them, because an Archaeopteryx fossil is way more valuable. Only twelve specimens are even known to exist.
Doesn’t it take forever for bones to fossilize, though? Plus, he’s going to have a hard time feeding that thing.
RE: Fact #6 (Apex Became Auction Record Holder) – Thank goodness Sotheby’s ensured it went to a billionaire instead of a museum where the public could actually see it. Because who would want something that educational and impressive to be accessible to everyone?
Why is it the auction house’s fault that the person who found it wanted to sell it instead of donating it? It seems like the commercial paleontologist should be the one getting the heat here.
RE: Fact #42 (Dreadnoughtus Died Before Full Growth) – The name Dreadnoughtus actually traces back to a class of British warships from the early 1900s, which itself borrowed the name from a 16th-century ship. It literally translates to ‘dread’ and ‘nought’, basically, ‘fear nothing.’
RE: Fact #47 (Stegosaurus Mating Still Baffles Scientists) – Probably similar to how porcupines manage it. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.
I love picturing some paleontologist devoting his life to this, eventually snapping, throwing glued-together Stegosaurus toys against the wall in a rage, and yelling at his wife like Jack Torrance in The Shining.
RE: Fact #40 (Ray Stanford Found Suburban Dinosaurs) – I actually know the guy! My mom worked at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum and helped bring his latest big find to the public. His house is wild, it’s filled with fossilized prints piled two feet high, with narrow paths carved out just to get around. I’ve gone fossil hunting with him, and he’s not kidding when he says it’s easy; I managed to find four or five prints and some coprolites in an hour near his place. As for the UFO stuff, yeah, he’s definitely out there. He’s a total eccentric and loves to spin elaborate yarns about every footprint, but you can’t deny he’s made some serious contributions to paleontology.
RE: Fact #41 (Tyrannosaurus rex Lost Kangaroo Posture) – For everyone complaining about the Jurassic Park dinos being the wrong size or missing feathers, remember they were genetically engineered for a theme park. The creators prioritized entertainment over historical accuracy.
RE: Fact #27 (Homer Hickam Hunted Tyrannosaurus rex) – That is pretty much the ultimate toddler dream: building rockets and hunting dinosaurs.
RE: Fact #24 (Thirty Seconds Changed Dinosaur History) – And if it had landed 45 seconds later, it would have hit the edge of the flat earth. The planet would have flipped over and over until the remaining dinosaurs died from extreme motion sickness. I call it the coin-flip extinction theory.
RE: Fact #39 (Deinocheirus Hid Behind Giant Arms) – Such a fascinating creature. I wonder what other hidden gems are still out there, and if there were other dinosaurs similar to this one.
RE: Fact #20 (Crocodile Relatives Ruled Before Dinosaurs) – This technically makes crocodiles more closely related to birds than to other lizards.
RE: Fact #11 (Tyrannosaurus rex Teenage Growth Spurt) – There is a great video explaining why there are few, if any, medium-sized carnivorous dinosaurs. The theory is that once a T. rex reached the juvenile stage, it was already the apex predator in that size category and it simply outcompeted other species.
Actually, in North America around 60 million years ago, there were plenty of medium-sized carnivorous dinosaurs.
RE: Fact #31 (Dueling Dinosaurs Got Stuck In Court) – >However, the case was appealed to the Montana Supreme Court in 2020, who ruled that fossils could not be considered minerals, allowing for the Museum of Natural Sciences to acquire the fossils.
So, this is literally the opposite of what the fact says.
A lower court ruled one way, then the supreme court overruled them. It’s a perfect example of how you can lie by leaving out half the story.
Exactly. This is why skimming is a bad idea if you are actually trying to learn something.
RE: Fact #50 (Apatosaurus Tail Crack Was Debated) – A pressure wave bouncing between a vacuum and +2 atmospheres hits 194 decibels, so physically, ‘sound’ can’t really go louder than that. A bullwhip is basically a sonic boom, a sharp pressure spike followed by a drop and another spike, so while I guess it’s possible to hit a high pressure peak, I’m still pretty skeptical.
RE: Fact #4 (Bone Wars Built Dinosaur Fame) – The fact doesn’t mention that it took paleontologists over a century to fix the mess those two created. Because of their rivalry, they would rush to publish reports on new finds, only for the other to reconfigure the bones and publish a counter-report. They misidentified over 200 species, often just making it up to beat their rival.
RE: Fact #11 (Tyrannosaurus rex Teenage Growth Spurt) – I saw this in another source, but the general consensus was that they would reach full growth by 20 and live to about 28. Their adult weight was estimated at 11, 000 to 15, 500 pounds.
Isn’t that basically the weight of an elephant? I would have expected a T-Rex to be lighter since it is essentially a giant bird.
RE: Fact #18 (Argentinosaurus Began With One Bone) – Looks like Argentina just found their new goalkeeper for the World Cup.
RE: Fact #33 (Jack Horner Helped Name Maiasaura) – He is easily one of the most significant paleontologists of the last 30 years. His work really shifted public perception, moving dinosaurs from just being seen as giant, dull lizards to something much more complex.
RE: Fact #25 (States Turned Fossils Into Symbols) – Michigan actually has two. We have the mastodon, and then there’s the Petoskey stone, which is our state stone but is technically fossilized coral. Because of the glaciers, we tend to dig up more recent animal fossils here, which is why we’ve found so many mastodon remains.
RE: Fact #17 (Velociraptor Was A Feathered Turkey) – Years ago at my Best Buy job, we had a pair of geese nesting in the parking lot. They were aggressive, but I usually tried to leave them be. One day, a goose charged me while I was carrying lunch, and I instinctively smacked it. A woman who saw it went inside to complain that I was being abusive. Later on, that same woman got blindsided by the goose while walking to her car. It chased her off and forced her to drop all her stuff. The loss prevention guy saw the whole thing, which made it pretty satisfying when he told the manager what actually happened.
RE: Fact #1 (Brontosaurus Won Its Name Back) – I spent so much time as a kid being a pedant and correcting people who called it a Brontosaurus for nothing.
That happens to me all the time as a millennial. It’s wild thinking about all the misinformation we were fed back then. Here’s a list of stuff that was presented as fact: – Blue veins aren’t actually oxygenated – Napoleon wasn’t actually short – Cracking your knuckles doesn’t cause arthritis – Dinosaurs didn’t go extinct – Touching toads won’t give you warts – Chameleons don’t change color for camouflage – Columbus didn’t discover America – We use way more than 10% of our brains – Cursive isn’t a life necessity – You’ll always have a calculator in your pocket – Most of the history behind Thanksgiving is wrong – Edison didn’t invent the lightbulb – Franklin’s kite experiment is largely a myth – The food pyramid was misleading – The War on Drugs propaganda – Pluto’s status – Putting two spaces after a period (I still do this one) I’m sure I’m forgetting plenty of other stuff I confidently repeated to people.
the calculator thing was just a bad prediction. And Pluto being reclassified doesn’t change the fact that it was considered a planet for a long time; teaching it as one was just based on the science of the era.
RE: Fact #30 (Pterodactyls Were Never Dinosaurs) – Plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs aren’t dinosaurs either. They’re categorized as aquatic reptiles.
RE: Fact #19 (Nigersaurus Replaced Teeth Every Fortnight) – If I could change anything about the human body, it would be our teeth. They should be able to regenerate like that. Instead, if you break a tooth as a teenager, you’re stuck dealing with it for the rest of your life.
RE: Fact #16 (Hadrosaur Survived Tyrannosaurus rex Bite) – This discovery is a huge blow to the theory that the T-Rex was strictly a scavenger.
RE: Fact #7 (Dinosaurs Left Fossils Behind) – The Met in New York actually has a display label from a museum that existed in Mesopotamia over three thousand years ago. It goes to show that civilization in that region has been around so long that they were already curating exhibits of ancient history way back then.
Playing Assassin’s Creed: Origins really puts this into perspective. The game is set in Ptolemaic Egypt, which we consider “ancient, ” but even for the Egyptians living then, the pyramids, the Sphinx, and most hieroglyphics were already ancient relics.
It is kind of wild to realize that people in the ancient world were just as curious about the past as we are. Once they had a little free time on their hands, why wouldn’t they be interested in what came before them?
We tend to view people from the past as stiff, distant figures, but they were just regular people. There is Viking graffiti in the Hagia Sophia that just says “Halfdan was here.” Even Julius Caesar felt depressed about not having achieved as much as Alexander the Great did at his age. People are always just people.
RE: Fact #28 (Chinese Villagers Boiled Dragon Bones) – Imagine being an apex predator that dominated the land for millennia, only to have your bones ground up to cure some guy’s dizziness. Life is wild.
The joke is on anyone who thinks they are consuming real bone rather than just bone-shaped rock.
RE: Fact #41 (Tyrannosaurus rex Lost Kangaroo Posture) – There’s only one thing scarier than a T-Rex hunting you down: a T-Rex hopping toward you like a kangaroo and covering fifty feet with every bounce.
RE: Fact #3 (Mock Mars Walk Found Fossil) – If you enjoy this kind of thing and happen to be in Alberta, you should definitely check out the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller. So many dinosaurs were discovered in that area, and there are countless stories of locals finding fossils while digging in their basements or on construction sites.
I can second that. I visited for a robotics competition that we did terrible in, but the museum itself was fantastic.
RE: Fact #2 (Dinger Started With Dinosaur Bones) – That’s exactly why the Nashville Predators mascot is a saber-toothed tiger. It wasn’t found under the arena, but it was unearthed while they were digging the foundation for a hotel nearby.
We actually have the bones on display at the arena’s guest relations desk, too.
RE: Fact #36 (Madhya Pradesh Worshipped Dinosaur Eggs) – baby dinosaurs are probably closer to being deities than stone balls are, so that feels like some kind of cosmic vindication.
RE: Fact #28 (Chinese Villagers Boiled Dragon Bones) – If anyone feels like they absolutely must consume rare things like rhino horns or fossils, I’d suggest they look at Xi Jinping. He’s definitely rare and important, plus he’s probably well-marbled.
RE: Fact #5 (Your Backyard Dinosaur Is Yours) – Before anyone gets too excited, you should know that finding a dinosaur in your backyard is incredibly rare. At most, you’d likely just find the remains of a dead one.
There are dinosaurs all over my backyard. Sometimes they wake me up in the morning chirping outside my window.
RE: Fact #10 (Some Dinosaurs Left No Fossils) – Roughly 99.99% of every species that ever walked this Earth is already extinct. I bet there were millions of bizarre creatures in the past that we will never even know existed.
RE: Fact #13 (Dinosaurs Still Fly As Birds) – As a vertebrate biologist, I can confirm this is the cool truth. There are still far more species of dinosaurs on this planet than there are mammals. But since mammals write the textbooks, this “Age of Mammals” thing might just be a marketing trick.
RE: Fact #28 (Chinese Villagers Boiled Dragon Bones) – Traditional Chinese medicine is incredibly frustrating. Why buy something like ground-up rhino horn to help with an issue when you could just use modern medicine? It’s wild that people see a random fossilized bone and think grinding it up might actually fix their health problems.
RE: Fact #27 (Homer Hickam Hunted Tyrannosaurus rex) – He is speed-running through the standard childhood “what I want to be when I grow up” list. Firefighter is next, followed probably by Batman.
RE: Fact #29 (Jurassic Park Used Cretaceous Dinosaurs) – Jurassic just has a better ring to it. Cretaceous Park sounds like the place is crawling with prawns or something.
RE: Fact #26 (Sauropod Vomit Could Kill You) – That is assuming they could actually vomit in the first place. Plenty of modern animals, like horses, aren’t physically capable of it.
RE: Fact #15 (Tyrannosaurus rex Blamed For Extinction) – Some of these older theories actually sound somewhat grounded, while others are totally out there. I came across this 1921 theory about geologic uplift, which is tame compared to the 1917 idea that dinosaurs had overactive pituitary glands and “diminished sexual activity.” And then, of course, there’s the “racial science” nonsense from 1910 about “racial senility.” It’s wild to look back at what they tried to pass off as science.
That first theory makes more sense when you realize they used to think those giant creatures had to live in swamps just to support their own weight.
RE: Fact #23 (Triceratops Teens Confused Paleontologists) – Most paleontologists think this idea is total nonsense. Jack Horner is more of a media personality than a serious scientist; he loves pushing wild theories just to grab headlines and funding. While it is true that some dinosaurs have been misidentified, his specific claims are absurd. Comparing a triceratops and a torosaurus is like saying a white-tailed deer is just a baby elk.
RE: Fact #39 (Deinocheirus Hid Behind Giant Arms) – Because of those long arms and its general build, people often call the species “Kevin Durant, ” even though it’s actually more closely related to birds than reptiles.
RE: Fact #12 (Tyrannosaurus rex Caught Bird Disease) – That is fascinating. I am only familiar with bovine trichomoniasis, which causes cows to miscarry. It is a sexually transmitted disease in cattle where bulls spread it between cows without showing any symptoms themselves. My dad has been involved in a grazing lease for over 20 years, and they eventually had to start using virgin bulls every year to avoid the disease.
I think it is a human STI as well, though it is uncommon enough that doctors don’t usually test for it in standard screening panels.
It is not included in most routine STI panels, but if a doctor sees specific clinical symptoms, they will order testing via wet mount microscopy.
RE: Fact #23 (Triceratops Teens Confused Paleontologists) – “This species had an aerodynamic body and was covered in bright feathers. This other species had a rotund midsection, no feathers on its head, and a lot of regrets.”
RE: Fact #15 (Tyrannosaurus rex Blamed For Extinction) – I remember reading about the “brain size” theory when I was a kid, and at the time, the comet idea was just considered wild speculation. I’m definitely showing my age.
I’m not even 40 yet, but I recall a book from kindergarten that claimed volcanic activity was the main theory for why they died out.
In grade school back in the mid-80s, we were taught that mammals ate all the eggs. The textbooks even had illustrations of honey badgers snacking on T-Rex eggs. It makes you realize how quickly species can vanish if they can’t adapt to pressure.
To be honest, the comet theory sounds just as wild if you stop and think about it: “A giant space rock nuked the dinosaurs.”
The funny thing is that the original 1977 study was a real reach. The idea of an asteroid impact was already floating around, but researchers pushed it because they found specific metals in a geological layer. They claimed it had to be a massive strike, but they had no direct proof or a crater to back it up until the 80s.
RE: Fact #13 (Dinosaurs Still Fly As Birds) – Owls, falcons, and eagles are literally called raptors: sad dinosaur noises.