Discovering Dinosaurs
Long, long ago, long before humans walked the Earth, the world was full of reptiles called dinosaurs.
There were reptiles that lived on land, swam in the sea, burrowed under the ground, and even flew through the skies.
There were dinosaurs that were taller than buildings, shorter than stools, bigger than construction cranes, and smaller than ducks.
They came in all shapes and sizes, just like humans!
The Ornithomimus was the fastest dinosaur. It could run as fast as a scooter!
The Hadrosaur was the dinosaur with the most teeth. It had more than a thousand!
The Pentaceratops was the dinosaur with the biggest head. Its skull was bigger than a refrigerator!
The Quetzalcoatlus was the biggest flying reptile.
The distance from the tip of one wing to the other was longer than a telephone pole!
The Micropachycephalosaurus was the dinosaur with the longest name, but it was very small — no bigger than a 4-year-old human!
The Therizinosaurus had the longest claws. Each claw was half as long as a bed!
The Argentinosaurus was one of the largest dinosaurs. It was larger than a cricket pitch!
The Shuvuuia was one of the smallest dinosaurs. It was the size of a hen!
So, where are all the dinosaurs now?
Dinosaurs disappeared millions of years ago. No human has ever seen one. All that’s left of them are fossils, which are often buried deep underground. Scientists are still searching for fossils to learn more about these amazing creatures.
Dinosaurs existed for 175 million years until Earth was struck by a meteor 65 million years ago, which slowly killed all the dinosaurs.
When the first dinosaur bone or fossil was discovered in 1677, scientists thought it was from a giant man! By the 1800s, scientists began to realise that they belonged to a different species that no longer existed. They called them ‘dinosaurs’ which means ‘terrible lizards’ in Greek.
Palaeontology, the study of animal and plant fossils, soon became popular. Palaeontologists have discovered around 700 species of dinosaurs, and are still finding more. Dinosaur fossils are most commonly found in China, South America and North America.
Do you want to see a dinosaur? Then look around you. Many scientists believe that birds are descendants of dinosaurs. Those terrible lizards are still among us!
