dinosaurs

"Like the teeth of the recent iguana, the crown of the tooth is accuminated; the edges are strongly serrated or dentated; the outer surface is ridged, and the inner smooth and convex; and as in that animal the secondary teeth appear to have been formed in a hollow in the base of the primary ones, which they expelled as they increased in size. From the appearance of the fangs in such fossil teeth as are in a good state of preservation, it seems probable that they adhered to the inner side of the maxillae, as in the iguana, and were not placed in separate alveoli, as in the crocodile. [...] [T]he term IGUANODON, derived from the form of the teeth, (and which I have adopted at the sugges­tion of the Rev. W. Conybeare) will not, it is presumed, be deemed objectionable."

"Iguanodon was a relative of the duckbill. It won international fame as the first dinosaur made known to science, when it was dug from road-gravel quarries in Sussex, England, in 1822. The iguanodont's adaptations were styled after the duckbill's—closely packed chopping shredding teeth (although iguanodont's weren't as complex as duckbill's)."

"In bas-relief he late has shown A horrible show, agreed— Megalosaurus, iguanodon, Palaeotherium Glypthaecon, A Barnum-show raree;"

"Iguanodon was about thirty feet (ten meters) long and weighed a few tons. It had a spike on its thumb for defense and a beak at the front of its mouth for snipping plants, and it could switch between walking on all fours and sprinting on its hind legs. Its line would eventually go on to produce the hadrosaurs, or duck-billed dinosaurs, [...]"

"In the morning it was not long before we discovered the source of the hideous uproar which had aroused us in the night. The iguanodon glade was the scene of a horrible butchery. From the pools of blood and the enormous lumps of flesh scattered in every direction over the green sward we imagined at first that a number of animals had been killed, but on examining the remains more closely we discovered that all this carnage came from one of these unwieldy monsters, which had been literally torn to pieces by some creature not larger, perhaps, but far more ferocious, than itself."

"He discovered the fossil bones of the prehistoric Iguanodon in the Sussex Weald"

"You'll find their footmarks all over the Hastings sands, in Kent, and in Sussex. The South of England was alive with them when there was plenty of good lush green-stuff to keep them going. Conditions have changed, and the beasts died. Here it seems that the conditions have not changed, and the beasts have lived."

"To judge from the dimensions of this thigh-bone, its former possessor must have been twice as great as that to which the similar bone in the Oxford Museum belonged; and if the total length and height of animals were in proportion to the linear dimensions of their extremities, the beast in question would have equalled in height our largest elephants, and in length fallen but little short of the largest whales; but as the longitudinal growth of animals is not in so high a ratio, after making some deduction, we may calculate the length of this reptile from Cuckfield at from sixty to seventy feet. In consideration therefore of the enormous magnitude which this saurian attains, I have ventured, in concurrence with my friend and fellow-labourer, the Rev. W. Conybeare, to assign to it the name of Megalosaurus."

"When the first dinosaur quarry was opened in 1822 at Stonesfield, England, quarry men found the one-ton Megalosaurus and a tiny mammal."

"As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn-hill."

"Megalosaurus had large blade-like teeth set in sockets, not adhering to the bone of the jaw as is the case among lizards. Buckland noted this important diagnostic feature, yet he failed to appreciate its importance. For it gave unassailable proof that Megalosaurus was not a gigantic lizard; it was a gigantic reptile with socketed teeth, such as are possessed by the crocodiles, yet it was not a crocodile, either—Buckland was sure of that. In short, Megalosaurus was something new, a reptile the like of which had never before been imagined."

"The indications would be consistent with the presence of a saber-toothed tiger, such as are still found among the breccia of our caverns; but the creature actually seen was undoubtedly of a larger and more reptilian character. Personally, I should pronounce for allosaurus.""Or megalosaurus," said Summerlee."Exactly. Any one of the larger carnivorous dinosaurs would meet the case. Among them are to be found all the most terrible types of animal life that have ever cursed the earth or blessed a museum."

"We cannot view this remarkable configuration of the anterior thoracic vertebrae of the Megalosaur without being impressed by an idea of the great strength of the muscles or ligaments—more probably of the energetically contracting muscles—which were implanted in those thick and lofty spines, from which, as from a fixed point, they acted upon the nuchal region of the head. The remarkable fossil, therefore, above described, yields some insight into the vigour with which such a head, consisting chiefly of the well-armed maxillary and mandibular apparatus, must have been made to operate on the bodies which the instincts of the Megalosaurus impelled it to grapple with and destroy in the reiterated predatory or combative acts necessary for its own support and preservation."

"In bas-relief he late has shown A horrible show, agreed— Megalosaurus, iguanodon, Palaeotherium Glypthaecon, A Barnum-show raree;"

"The movie was okay, but I will never forgive them for presenting Brachiosaurus as such a heavy limbed clunker. I had nothing to do with that. I thought it was too bad the potentially omnivorous brachiosaurs – which were unlikely to have been as placid as cattle – missed the opportunity to snarf up the bratty kids when they were up in the tree."

"There may be some ground for believing that brontosaurs ate... soft foods. If the possibility of gizzard stones is ignored, the brontosaurs' dentition does seem little equipped to deal with meals of tougher plants. But there are no ground whatsoever for believing it of duckbills."

"By themselves, brontosaur gizzards don't indicate how much or what these dinosaurs ate each day; other lines of evidence must be employed to explore these questions. But brontosaur gizzards and teeth together indicate what brontosaurs did not eat. They didn't eat soft, mushy vegetation. Birds that subsist entirely on soft fruits don't possess muscular gizzards and don't use hard pebbles for their gizzard linings. Soft, watery food requires only a short, simply constructed gut - with just enough contractile force to squeeze out all the juices. Brontosaur teeth, moreover, confirm the heretical idea that they ate a tough vegetable diet. If the brontosaurs dined only on soft water plants, then very little wear would be found on their teeth. But in fact the teeth of Camarasaurus, Brachiosaurus, and their kin manifest very severe wear, which could only have been produced by tough or gritty food."

"The sum of evolutionary evidence is thoroughly damning. In nearly every modification of the evolutionary process made in the duckbills as they developed from their dryosaur ancestors, the duckbills suffered a diminution of their swimming potential. Their fore- and hind paws became shorter and more compact, not longer and more widely spread. Their tails got weaker and stiffer. Far from being the best, the duckbills must have been the clumsiest and slowest swimmers in all the Dinosauria. If pressed, they probably could paddle slowly from one riverbanck to another. The central theme of their bodily evolution was indeed specialized - orthodox theory was right on that point - but the direction of specialization was landward. These dinosaurs were specialized for a totally terrestrial existence."

"In comparing the hadrosaurs with other dinosaurian herbivores, it is striking that they alone lack any obvious defensive or protective adaptations. They possessed no horns, no claws, no sharp teeth, they carried no clubbed or spiked tail, and they had no bony armor. They certainly were not constructed for rapid flight and they cannot be considered giants for their time. In short, the hadrosaurs appear to have been quite defenseless — a most improbable plight. As an alternative it seems increasingly probable that they depended upon the relative security of lakes, swamps, or rivers and thereby escaped from their enemies."

"No living reptile has cheeks. But no living reptile has grinding teeth anything remotely resembling those of a duckbill. If the duckbills could have evolved such unreptilian teeth, why couldn't they have evolved unreptilian teeth?"

"Duckbills were supposedly croc-style swimmers, moving by strong, easy, side-to-side flexures of their tail. Therefore, the optimal design would feature vertical tail spines. But duckbill spines all slanted strongly backward, exactly as in land-living lizards, not in swimmers. Another problem in the duckbill's swimming equipment lies in the profile of the tail. The deepest part of the croc's tail is close to the end, because the end swings through a wider arc than does the base in moving side to side. Thus the tail is deepest where it can do the most good in pushing against the water. All powerful tail-scullers have such deep tail ends. But duckbill tails were deepest at the hips and become progressively narrower from top-to-bottom toward the tip - another caudal feature nearly totally maladapted for its primary function."

"There may be some ground for believing that brontosaurs ate... soft foods. If the possibility of gizzard stones is ignored, the brontosaurs' dentition does seem little equipped to deal with meals of tougher plants. But there are no ground whatsoever for believing it of duckbills. The mouth of a duckbill dinosaur contained one of the efficient cranial Cusinarts in land-vertebrate history. Duckbill teeth and jaws were incomparable grinders, designed to cope with foods right inside the duckbill's oral compartment."

"Although of modest size, this creature was one of the most unusual of all dinosaurs and provides entirely new insight on the classification of predaceous dinosaurs and on the surprisingly sophisticated capabilities possessed by some theropods."

"In my opinion, the foot of Deinonychus is perhaps the most revealing bit of anatomical evidence pertaining to dinosaurian habits and capabilities to be discovered in many decades. Grandiose statements of this kind are, of course, easily rejected, but the functional implications of the pes of Deinonychus are not so easily discarded - especially in view of the other remarkable adaptations of this animal. Deinonychus must have been anything but "reptilian" in its behavior, responses and way of life. It must have been a fleet-footed, highly predaceous, extremely agile and very active animal, sensitive to many stimuli and quick in its responses. These in turn indicate and unusual level of activity from a reptile and suggest an unusually high metabolic rate."

"Put a leopard and a [Deinonychus] together and the former would be in trouble."

"It is a really bizarre dinosaur - there's no real blueprint for it. It has a long neck, a long trunk, a long tail, a 7ft (2.1m) sail on its back and a snout like a crocodile. And when we look at the body proportions, the animal was clearly not as agile on land as other dinosaurs were, so I think it spent a substantial amount of time in the water."

"If we base the ferocious factor on the length of the animal, there was nothing that ever lived on this planet that could match this creature."

"It was a chimera: half duck, half crocodile. We don’t have anything alive that looks like this today."

"[Deinonychus] is usually considered a small dinosaur. But the largest individual was an eleven-foot-long animal whose head approached half a yard long, and was of male-timber-wolf mass. If alive today it would be considered a big predator."

"These are among my very favourite dinosaurs. Their long up-curved skulls, slender yet compact proportions, and great sickle claws make these elegant, attractive, yet demonic animals. There is nothing else like them. Pound for pound, these are among the most powerful of known predators; certainly no other theropod had such a combination of foot, hand, and head weaponry... Among theropods only Tyrannosaurus, with its extreme skull strength, equalled Velociraptor in total power relative to weight."

"The more that we learn about these animals the more we find that there is basically no difference between birds and their closely related dinosaur ancestors like Velociraptor. Both have wishbones, brooded their nests, possess hollow bones, and were covered in feathers. If animals like velociraptor were alive today our first impression would be that they were just very unusual looking birds."

"The scene has been portrayed in paintings, drawings, and illustrations hundreds of times, but it remains thrilling. Tyrannosaurus, the greatest dinosaur toreador, confronts Triceratops, the greatest set of dinosaur horns. No matchup between predator and prey has ever been more drammatic. It's somehow fitting that those two massive antagonists lived out their co-evolutionary belligerence through the very last days of the very last epoch in the Age of Dinosaurs. Tyrannosaurus stood over twenty feet tall when fully erect, and a large adult was as heavy as a small elephant - five tons. No predatory dinosaur, no predatory land animal of any sort, had more powerful jaws. Withstanding a Tyrannosauruss attack required either tanklike armor - the approach taken by Ankylosaurus - or most powerful defensive weapons - the approach taken by Triceratops."

"Yes, while T. rex played a prominent role in Crichton's pair of novels Jurassic Park (1990) and a sequel, The Lost World (1995), those nasty, sickle-clawed Velociraptors absolutely stole the show! The raptors took center stage in both novels and three Jurassic Park movies. But while no movie featured raptor dinosaurs before the Jurassic Park phenomenon, by then raptors had already stormed the beaches of science fiction literature... For besides fear and nightmares, now, simply the name Velociraptor - a dinosaur the name of which few knew thirty years ago - also evokes thoughts of DNA cloning, feathers and avian connections, warm-bloodedness, and even the softer side of familial relations. Now raptors are veritable monsters not only due to their inherent savagery, but also for their crafty, menacing intellect. Indeed, the raptors are imbued with qualities far too human-like for our comfort."

"In case you haven't already done so, forget Crichton's Velociraptors and their absurd criminal plagiarisms: you'd be doing a favour to the real-life feathers-and-bones Velociraptor!"

"Raptors did not actually resemble the reptilian monsters depicted in popular cinema, but were very large predatory ground birds, some with wings of substantial size (evidence of this comes from feather anchor points found on the wing bones of Velociraptor mongoliensis). The "raptors" did not closely resemble their carnosaurian cousins, but rather oversized Archaeopteryx."

"The rex bite is unique among better known dinosaurs. Instead of inflicting a long, shallow wound, rex jaws would thrust a few crowns deep into bone armor, killing a Triceratops with a single blow. We see close-linked co-evolution here, a terminal Cretaceous arms race. Triceratops is the commonest horned dino of the time, the final dinosaurian Age, the Lancian. T’tops departs from the ceratopsian tradition of frill construction. Torosaurus, very rare during the Lancian Age of the Cretaceous, retains that basic design: the frill is composed of thin bone rods that make a frame, with huge holes in the middle. Triceratops fills in the holes with greatly thickened bone. Why would Triceratops invest in five times as much bone volume in its frill? Well…to me the answer is obvious. Because the commonest predator has evolved great, armor-penetrating teeth. The argument goes in the other direction – T. rex evolved swollen, tall tooth crowns to deal with the unusual protection of the commonest horned herbivore."

"Come ho estesamenente discusso in passato, non ci sono prove che questo teropode avesse un'intelligenza "da scimpanzé"..., né che cacciasse in branchi organizzati. Anche se banale da dire, esso non deve essere visto come una terrificante "macchina da morte" ma solamente come un interessante predatore diapside opportunista, molto probabilmente solitario e tendente all'agguato, con un comportamento ed un'intelligenza intermedi tra quelli dei coccodrilli e quelli dei grandi uccelli non volatori."

"In bas-relief he late has shown A horrible show, agreed— Megalosaurus, iguanodon, Palaeotherium Glypthaecon, A Barnum-show raree; The vomit of slimy and sludgey sea: Purposeless creatures, odd inchoate things Which splashed thro’ morasses on fleshly wings; The cubs of Chaos, with eyes askance, Preposterous griffins that squint at Chance And Anarch’s cracked decree! Oh the showman who dens in Engihoul, Would he fright us, or quit us, or fool?"

"As I've said numerous times before, there is no proof that this theropod had chimpanzee-level intelligence..., nor that it hunted in organised packs. It may seem obvious, but it shouldn't be seen as a terrifying "killing machine", but simply as an interesting and opportunistic diapsid predator which was most probably a solitary ambush hunter, with a behaviour and intelligence intermediate between that of crocodiles and large flightless birds."

"Alterations to our favorite dinosaurs filter into the public consciousness only slowly, often taking a generation or more to become accepted. I’m now an unabashed advocate for fuzzy, fluffy, bristly, and feathered dinosaurs, but before I knew better I couldn’t believe that dinosaurs were different from the scaly monstrosities I grew up with. The fact that Jurassic Park 4 is supposed to feature naked dinosaurs—contrary to the overwhelming evidence science has to offer—confirms that many paleo fans of my generation and older prefer the comfort of recognizable pseudo-dinos to the more realistic ones paleontologists are reviving. But the latest generation of little dinosaur maniacs is fully onboard with the latest science. Then again, today’s dinosaur dreams might become fossilized in their minds, too. I wonder what they will scoff at when they grow up and see future museum displays or films that depict dinosaurs in ways that are strange and unfamiliar from what they learned in their childhoods."

"Godzilla was the most masterful of all dinosaur movies because it made you believe it was really happening."

"Sauropod dinosaurs are the terrestrial superlative: they were not just the largest animals ever to have walked on land, but an order of magnitude heavier than their nearest rivals – the hadrosaurid dinosaurs, and the proboscidean and indricotherian mammals."

"Nel caso non l'aveste ancora fatto, dimenticate i Velociraptor di Crichton e le loro assurde scimmiottaggini criminali: farete un favore alla memoria dei Velociraptor in penne e ossa!"

"Come molti hanno sottolineato, ormai Tyrannosaurus rex ha travalicato i confini della pura ricerca scientifica, imponendosi come icona post-moderna e geomitologia. Ciò lo rende immune della normale critica scientifica, per questo risulta così inattaccabile, quasi sacro. Nessuno vorrebbe abbandonare il mitico Tyrannosaurus rex per l'oscuro Manospondylus gigas. Cosa dovremmo fare? Distruggere il nostro mito per accettare il rigore scientifico che impone di sostituire un nome con quello cronologicamente prioritario?"

"What gave archosaurs the edge as large predators at this time, and therapsids the edge as smaller ones? Frankly, I am not sure. Both seem to have had heightened metabolic rates and fur or feather insulation... Perhaps the chief advantage enjoyed by thecodonts centered around their big, slashing attack jaws. These may have made them better big-game hunters, while the more precise cutting teeth of therapsids were more suitable for smaller prey."

"If not for the long tail, one might mistake a theropod for a big, toothy, marauding bird in the dark. That theropods are birdlike is logical, since birds are their closest living relatives. Remember that next time you eat a drumstick or scramble some eggs."

"Archaeopteryx is so nearly identical in all known features with small carnivorous dinosaurs that it is hard to believe feathers were not present in such dinosaurs."

"Every feature that is known to exist in every bird universally accepted as such is also found on dinosaurs: four-chambered heart, fused caudal vertebrae, gastroliths, even the avian respiratory system have all been found on fossil theropods, especially dromaeosaurs and maniraptors. You can distinguish birds among dinosaurs, but it is no longer possible to distinguish birds from dinosaurs."

"Even though paleontologists have uncovered numerous dinosaurs with everything from bristles and fuzz to full-flight feathers—which document the evolution of plumage from fluff to aerodynamic structures that allowed dinosaurs to take to the air—creationists deny the clear fossil record. There’s plenty of reason for creationists to abhor dinosaur feathers. The mountain of evidence that birds are living dinosaurs, and that many “bird” traits were widely shared among non-avian dinosaurs, are among the most gorgeous examples of evolutionary change yet found. Put feathers on a Velociraptor—we know it had feathers thanks to quill knobs preserved along its arm bones—and you get something disturbingly birdlike, revealing the dinosaur’s kinship to the ancestors of Archaeopteryx and other early birds. Not surprisingly, creationist groups like Answers in Genesis don’t feature feathery dinosaurs in their literature and museum exhibits. Instead, they take pride in promoting out-of-date, monstrous dinosaurs that more easily fit their contention that these animals were created separately from all other forms of life."

"Although some dinosaurs may have spent some time feeding in the water like moose or fishing cats, at most a few became strongly amphibious in the manner of hippos, much less marine as per seals and whales. The only strongly aquatic dinosaurs are some birds. The occasional statement that there were marine dinosaurs is therefore incorrect - these creatures of Mesozoic seas were various forms of reptiles that had evolved over the eons."