26 Sauropod Vomit Could Kill You
Paleontologist Anthony J. Martin once explored a strange question in a hypothetical dinosaur scenario: What would happen if a giant sauropod vomited from the height of its head? Working with physicist Jed Brody, he estimated that the speed and weight of the falling slurry could hit with enough force to seriously injure or kill something below.
27. After his NASA career and the success of October Sky, American author and former engineer Homer Hickam took up dinosaur hunting in the American West. That hobby turned serious enough that he discovered, or helped discover, five Tyrannosaurus rex skeletons, an unusually high number for any fossil hunter.
28. For years in Henan province, China, villagers dug up dinosaur fossils and treated them as traditional medicine instead of scientific finds. They called the fossils “dragon bones,” then boiled them in soup or ground them into powder because they believed the material could help with problems like dizziness and leg cramps in children. Scientists later realized that bones being sold and consumed in the area were actually dinosaur fossils.
29. Despite the title, the Jurassic Park movie built much of its dinosaur cast from animals that lived later, during the Cretaceous Period, rather than the Jurassic Period. Famous stars like Tyrannosaurus rex, Velociraptor, Triceratops, Gallimimus, and Parasaurolophus all came from that later age. Only some of its best-known dinosaurs, such as Brachiosaurus, actually fit the title.
30. Pterodactyls lived in the age of dinosaurs, but they were not dinosaurs themselves. They belonged to Pterosauria, a separate group of flying reptiles that shared a common archosaur ancestry with dinosaurs. That is why the label “flying dinosaur” is catchy but wrong. They were reptile cousins of dinosaurs, not members of the dinosaur family itself.
31 Dueling Dinosaurs Got Stuck In Court
In 2006, fossil hunters in Montana uncovered an extraordinary pair of dinosaurs preserved together in what looked like a deadly struggle. The specimen then spent years in private hands while a legal battle dragged on over who actually owned it, leaving one of the most famous dinosaur finds in the world largely unavailable for full scientific study. The turning point came in 2020, when the Montana Supreme Court ruled that fossils are not minerals, helping clear the way for the fossil to reach a public museum. Once researchers finally got access, the story changed again: by 2025, the carnivore once described as a young T. rex was reidentified as Nanotyrannus lancensis.
32. In 1858, lawyer and fossil enthusiast William Parker Foulke excavated a dinosaur skeleton in Haddonfield, New Jersey, at a marl pit on the Hopkins farm. The bones were later named Hadrosaurus foulkii, and the find became the first relatively complete dinosaur skeleton discovered in North America. After the excavation, the exact site slipped out of public memory, fell into neglect, and eventually turned into a trash-strewn dumping area. Then in 1984, Boy Scout Christopher Brees tracked it down for an Eagle Scout project and helped restore one of the most important dinosaur sites in American history.
33. American paleontologist Jack Horner built much of his reputation on dinosaur discoveries in Montana, including the work he did with Robert Makela on a new genus they named Maiasaura. That dinosaur became famous because its nesting sites gave some of the clearest early evidence that certain dinosaurs cared for their young. Horner later brought that expertise into pop culture by serving as a technical adviser for the Jurassic Park films. After that, he pushed the famous DinoChicken idea, a research project that explored whether chicken embryos could be altered to express more dinosaur-like traits.
34. In 1833, fossil hunter Mary Anning was out searching the cliffs in England when a landslide crashed down around her and nearly killed her. She survived, but her dog was killed, and the accident became one more danger in a life spent hunting fossils on unstable coastal cliffs. Anning had already made some of the most important fossil discoveries of the age, including a famous ichthyosaur and the first complete plesiosaur skeleton. Even with those achievements, the Geological Society of London excluded her because she was a woman, and her working-class background only made that barrier worse.
35. Scientists have long known that dinosaur droppings can fossilize into coprolites and preserve clues about ancient diets. One famous giant specimen (30 cm) from Late Cretaceous rocks was already so big that researchers thought only a predator like Tyrannosaurus rex could have produced it. But a recently found one named Barnum is now described to be about 67.5 centimeters long, and it is still believed to have come from a T. rex.
36 Madhya Pradesh Worshipped Dinosaur Eggs
For generations in Padlya village in Madhya Pradesh, families worshipped small stone balls as Kakar Bhairav, a clan deity believed to protect their land and livestock. Then paleontologists examined the objects and realized they were actually 70-million-year-old fossilized dinosaur eggs from the Late Cretaceous, part of the rich nesting grounds of the Narmada Valley.
37. For a long time, scientists thought colored eggs were a bird innovation that appeared after birds split from other dinosaurs. That changed in 2018, when a Nature study found evidence that eggshell pigments had already evolved in non-avian theropod dinosaurs.
38. Older dinosaur books sometimes suggested that giant dinosaurs could survive for 300 years because researchers pictured them as slow-metabolism reptiles, more like huge crocodiles or turtles. Later studies of dinosaur bone growth changed that picture by showing that many dinosaurs grew relatively fast and did not live on such stretched-out reptile timelines. Modern estimates suggest that even the biggest dinosaurs probably lived for decades rather than centuries, with large sauropods often placed closer to something like 70 or 80 years.
39. For almost 49 years, paleontologists knew Deinocheirus mostly from a pair of enormous arms found in Mongolia in 1965. Those forelimbs measured nearly 8 feet long, making them the longest known arms of any bipedal dinosaur, but the rest of the animal remained a mystery. Then in 2014, scientists finally described two much more complete skeletons, including fossils that had been looted by poachers before key pieces were recovered. The full animal turned out to be far stranger than anyone expected: a huge, hump-backed, duck-billed dinosaur unlike almost anything researchers had imagined.
40. Self-taught naturalist Ray Stanford stunned paleontologists by finding dinosaur tracks in the Washington, D.C. and Maryland suburbs, an area where only a small number had been recognized before he started searching seriously. Over the years, he built a reputation for spotting tiny patterns and odd shapes in exposed rock that other people walked past, and that skill helped him uncover hundreds of prints and several major sites. His finds eventually included important track slabs at places like NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, where later study revealed a remarkable collection of ancient footprints. Stanford also spent much of his life pursuing UFOs.
41 Tyrannosaurus rex Lost Kangaroo Posture
For much of the 1900s, Tyrannosaurus rex was often shown standing upright with its tail dragging on the ground, almost like a giant kangaroo. That pose appeared in museum mounts, books, and movies because early researchers had not yet worked out how the animal really balanced its body. Later evidence from dinosaur trackways and anatomy showed that T. rex actually held its body much more horizontally, with the tail stretched out behind as a counterweight. By the time Jurassic Park arrived in 1993, that revised posture was already accepted by scientists, and the movie helped make the newer, more realistic version famous with the public.
42. When paleontologists described Dreadnoughtus schrani in 2014, they revealed one of the biggest dinosaurs ever known from a relatively complete skeleton, found in Patagonia, Argentina. The main individual measured about 85 feet long, and the original study said its bones showed it had not yet reached full adult size when it died.
43. Most dinosaur bones fossilize through more ordinary mineral replacement, but a few took a far stranger path. In places like Lightning Ridge, Australia, underground conditions allowed some ancient bones to be replaced by opal, turning them into shimmering gemstone fossils instead of typical rock-hard remains.
44. When scientists studied the fossil later named Irritator, they realized the skull had been tampered with before it reached them. Fossil dealers had added plaster and altered parts of the specimen, apparently to make it look better and raise its sale value. That left paleontologists stuck trying to separate the real anatomy from the fake additions. Their frustration was so strong that they turned it into the dinosaur’s name: Irritator.
45. In Early Cretaceous China, a stocky mammal called Repenomamus robustus ate part of a young Psittacosaurus, and the proof ended up inside the fossil itself. Paleontologists found dinosaur remains preserved in the mammal’s stomach, showing that at least some Mesozoic mammals did more than hide from dinosaurs in the undergrowth. That discovery overturned the old image of all early mammals as tiny, helpless creatures living entirely in the shadow of giant reptiles.
15 Most Controversial & Costly Blunders in History
46 Repenomamus Attacked Psittacosaurus Midfight
About 125 million years ago in what is now northeastern China, a cat-sized mammal called Repenomamus robustus attacked a beaked dinosaur named Psittacosaurus lujiatunensis. The fossil shows the mammal biting into the dinosaur’s rib area while clinging to it with its limbs, which led researchers to argue that this was an active attack, not simple scavenging. Before the fight could end, a sudden volcanic debris flow of ash and mud buried both animals together and preserved the struggle in stone.
47. Stegosaurus looked like a mating problem waiting to happen. Its huge plates rose along the back, while its spiked tail added even more danger, and paleontologists still do not know exactly how two adults managed the process without hurting each other.
48. About 120 million years ago, during the Early Cretaceous, a small dinosaur called Microraptor lived in what is now Liaoning, China. Its body carried long feathers not just on its arms, but also on its legs, giving it a strange four-winged design unlike anything seen in the same way today. Those feathers likely helped it glide, and some later studies have even suggested it may have been capable of powered flight.
49. In 1897, paleontologist Walter Granger was exploring in Wyoming when he found a cabin built with dinosaur bones gathered from the ground nearby. He followed the trail back to a hillside littered with fossils and realized the area was an extraordinary bone bed, later named Bone Cabin Quarry. That discovery opened one of the richest dinosaur dig sites in the American West, producing huge numbers of Jurassic fossils over the years that followed.
50. In 1997, researchers proposed that the long, tapering tail of Apatosaurus could work like a giant bullwhip. Their model suggested the tip might move fast enough to create a crack louder than 200 decibels, which led to dramatic ideas about tail displays, defense, and even sexual selection. But newer work in 2022 pushed back, arguing that the tail’s real tissues and structure would probably break down before it ever reached that kind of speed.
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.