Dinosaur Quiz
Much of what films show about dinosaurs, from scaly skin to giant raptors, has been overturned by fossils.
A dinosaur quiz with answers that goes beyond naming the biggest and the fiercest. It looks at what fossils have revealed in recent decades about how these animals looked, when they lived and what became of them.
Did you know?
- Brontosaurus has had an unusual career. Named in 1879, it was judged in 1903 to be the same animal as the earlier Apatosaurus, so the name was officially dropped while remaining famous. A detailed study in 2015 argued that the two are different enough for Brontosaurus to be valid after all.
- One of the most complete Tyrannosaurus skeletons ever found is nicknamed Sue, after the fossil hunter who spotted it in South Dakota in 1990. It was sold at auction in 1997 for more than eight million dollars and is displayed in a museum in Chicago.
- Stegosaurus weighed as much as a small lorry, yet its brain was about the size of a plum. Scientists once suggested that a swelling in its hip held a second brain to control the tail. The space is now thought to have stored energy-rich tissue, as in birds.
What fossils tell us about dinosaurs
Dinosaurs appeared around 230 million years ago and dominated life on land for well over 150 million years, far longer than humans have existed. Their era is divided into three periods: the Triassic, the Jurassic and the Cretaceous. During that time the continents drifted apart, flowering plants appeared and dinosaurs evolved into thousands of species, from animals the size of a pigeon to the largest creatures ever to walk the Earth.
The first discoveries
People had been finding giant bones for centuries and explaining them as dragons or giants. The first dinosaur to receive a scientific name was Megalosaurus, described in England in 1824. On the south coast, Mary Anning, a self-taught collector, uncovered complete skeletons of ancient sea reptiles that changed ideas about extinction. In the late nineteenth century two rival American scientists raced to name new species, a contest so bitter that it became known as the Bone Wars.
Feathers and colour
The biggest change in recent decades concerns appearance. In 1996 a small dinosaur with a coat of simple feathers was found in north-eastern China, and many more have followed. It now seems that feathers were common, at first for warmth and display rather than flight. In a few fossils the microscopic structures that hold pigment have survived, allowing scientists to work out patterns such as stripes on a tail.
How the story ended
About 66 million years ago an asteroid some ten kilometres wide struck the Earth. Dust and soot darkened the sky, plants died and food chains collapsed. Around three quarters of all species disappeared, including every dinosaur except the ancestors of birds. A thin layer of clay rich in the rare metal iridium, found in rocks around the world, was the first clue that led scientists to the impact.