The Ultimate Dinosaur Encyclopedia

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An up-and-comer on the dinosaur popularity charts, Spinosaurus, or spine lizard, was distinguished by its vast size (59 feet long) and likely weight of a couple of tons more than T. There is evidence that many types of slow-growing dinosaurs, including various theropods, sauropods, ankylosaurians, ornithopods, and ceratopsians, formed aggregations of immature individuals.

Some non-dinosaurian archosaurs, including rauisuchians, also had erect limbs but achieved this by a "pillar-erect" configuration of the hip joint, where instead of having a projection from the femur insert on a socket on the hip, the upper pelvic bone was rotated to form an overhanging shelf. Stomach contents in some Jehol and Yanliao dinosaurs closely related to birds have also provided indirect indications of diet and digestive system anatomy (e. The general homogeneity of dinosaurian faunas continued into the Middle and Late Jurassic, where most localities had predators consisting of ceratosaurians, megalosauroids, and allosauroids, and herbivores consisting of stegosaurian ornithischians and large sauropods. Four times heavier than Dippy the Diplodocus and 12 metres longer than Hope our blue whale, don't miss your chance to see this extraordinary dinosaur up close.

Additional evidence for attacking live prey is the partially healed tail of an Edmontosaurus, a hadrosaurid dinosaur; the tail is damaged in such a way that shows the animal was bitten by a tyrannosaur but survived. It had a total length of roughly 26 metres (about 85 feet) and an estimated mass of 59 metric tons (about 65.

Sir Richard Owen's coining of the word dinosaur, in the 1842 revised version of his talk at an 1841 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Ever since they were first identified in the 1800s, dinosaurs have sparked the imagination of kids and adults alike. While modern birds have only one functional oviduct and lay one egg at a time, more primitive birds and dinosaurs had two oviducts, like crocodiles. Saurischians differ from ornithischians by keeping the ancestral configuration of bones in the pelvis (shown in a diagram above).Their descendants, the birds, number 9,000 living species, and are the most diverse group of land vertebrates. These new localities also led to improvements in overall specimen quality, with new species being increasingly named not on scrappy fossils but on more complete skeletons, sometimes from multiple individuals. For example, as diapsids, dinosaurs ancestrally had two pairs of Infratemporal fenestrae (openings in the skull behind the eyes), and as members of the diapsid group Archosauria, had additional openings in the snout and lower jaw. Probably the most instantly recognizable of all dinosaurs is the North American Triceratops (three-horned face), with its parrot-like beak and huge frill at the back of its head. Here are some at-a-glance reasons on what makes these dinosaurs so appealing, along with some inspiration to seek out the lesser known ones.