{"id":7629,"date":"2016-07-05T23:39:14","date_gmt":"2016-07-06T06:39:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/BigJimIndustries.com\/wordpress\/?p=7629"},"modified":"2016-07-21T23:43:01","modified_gmt":"2016-07-22T06:43:01","slug":"dino-myths","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2016\/07\/05\/dino-myths\/","title":{"rendered":"Dino-myths"},"content":{"rendered":"

from RealClear Science<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The Top Six Dinosaur Myths<\/h1>\n

By<\/strong>\u00a0Nick Longrich<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n

We can go to the gift shop after you\u2019ve eaten\u00a0Dave Catchpole\/Flickr<\/a>,\u00a0CC BY<\/a><\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

When the first dinosaur bone\u00a0was described in 1676<\/a>, it was thought to come from an elephant or perhaps a giant. Over a century later, scientists realised such fossils came from a creature they named Megalosaurus, portrayed as a sort of stocky, overgrown lizard. Then, in 1842, leading anatomist Richard Owen recognised Megalosaurus as part of a whole new group of animals, which he named Dinosauria, or \u201cTerrible Lizards\u201d.<\/p>\n

Since then, around 700 different dinosaur species have been described, with\u00a0more found<\/a>\u00a0every<\/a>month<\/a>. Our ideas about dinosaurs have also changed radically. The dinosaurs we know today are very different from the ones in the books you may have read as a child.<\/p>\n

Myth 1: Dinosaurs were all big<\/h2>\n

The name dinosaur tends to evoke images of giants \u2013 and certainly many were very large.\u00a0Tyrannosaurus rex<\/em>\u00a0was around 12 metres long and weighed more than five tonnes, the size of an elephant, and it probably wasn\u2019t even the\u00a0biggest carnivore<\/a>. Long-necked, plant-eating sauropods grew to titanic proportions. The enormous\u00a0Argentinosaurus<\/em>\u00a0is known from just a few bones, but its size has been estimated at 30 metres in length and\u00a080 tonnes in weight<\/a>. That\u2019s larger than any living land mammal and all but the largest whales. And dinosaurs are unique here. No other group of land animals before or since was able to grow as large.<\/p>\n

But not all dinosaurs were giants. The horned dinosaur\u00a0Protoceratops<\/em><\/a>\u00a0was the size of a sheep.\u00a0Velociraptor<\/em>\u00a0was the size of a golden retriever and had to be scaled up for\u00a0Jurassic Park<\/a>\u00a0to make it more terrifying. Recent years have seen an explosion in the number of small species discovered, such as the
\ncat-sized raptor\u00a0<\/a>Hesperonychus<\/em>, the\u00a0rabbit-sized plant-eater\u00a0Tianyulong<\/em><\/a>, and the quail-sized insect-eater\u00a0Parvicursor<\/em><\/a>. The smaller species were probably more common than their giant cousins. It\u2019s just that the massive bones of a\u00a0T. rex<\/em>\u00a0are more likely to have been preserved and a lot easier to spot in the field.<\/p>\n

[ click to continue reading at RealClear Science<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

from RealClear Science The Top Six Dinosaur Myths By\u00a0Nick Longrich We can go to the gift shop after you\u2019ve eaten\u00a0Dave Catchpole\/Flickr,\u00a0CC BY When the first dinosaur bone\u00a0was described in 1676, it was thought to come from an elephant or perhaps a giant. Over a century later, scientists realised such fossils came from a creature they […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7629","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-weirdness"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7629","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7629"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7629\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7629"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7629"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7629"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}