Random Laughably Wrong Things People Used To Think About Dinosaurs (14 items)

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  (#9) The Elasmosaurus Had A Snake Neck

  One of the first interpretation of the elasmosaurus was actually pretty cool looking, if totally inaccurate. Othniel Charles Marsh believed the elasmosaurus’s long neck was “snake-like” meaning not only did it look like a snake, but it had the same incredible range of motion. We now know that because the elasmosaurus had only 71 vertebrae in its very long neck, its range of motion was far more limited. It could only move side-to-side or up-and-down.

  We also thought the elasmosaurus crawled out of the ocean to give birth on land, but because of its inability to move efficiently, it most likely just gave birth in the ocean. 
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  (#1) The Brontosaurus Was A Real Dinosaur

  The brontosaurus, also known as a the “thunder lizard” had a massive body, a long swooping tail, and an unusually small head. It’s also about as real as the Loch Ness Monster.

  In the 1870s, paleontology went through a period called the Bone Wars. During the Bone Wars, two paleontologists named Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope were trying to outdo each other by discovering new dinosaurs as fast as they could. The rivals were so desperate to destroy each other they intentionally sabotaged each other’s work by having dinosaur skeletons smashed before the other guy could dig them up.

  In 1877, Marsh found a partial apatosaurus skeleton. It didn’t have a skull, so in 1883 he hastily completed the skeleton with the skull of another dinosaur, the camarasaurus. Two years later, his team found what they thought was a different dinosaur, but was actually just an apatosaurus with its proper head. Desperate to beat Cope, he quickly determined the complete apatosaurus was a new dinosaur called the brontosaurus. It wasn’t until almost 100 years later the truth was discovered by a group of Carnegie researchers. The brontosaurus isn’t a thing - it’s just an apatosaurus with the right skull.
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  (#14) Caterpillars Killed The Dinosaurs

  In 1962, an entomologist named Stanley Flanders claimed caterpillars were responsible for the downfall of dinosaurs. How could such a tiny creature take down the dominant species on the planet? According to Flanders, caterpillars had no natural predators, which allowed them strip all the vegetation around them bare. This led to mass starvation amongst the herbivores, which in turn left the carnivores with nobody to eat. 

  While this is an oddly compelling theory, it doesn’t explain why so many dinosaurs went extinct around the same time the earth was hit by an enormous asteroid. The prevailing theory, that dinosaurs were wiped out by a combination of the asteroid’s impact and its subsequent effect on the environment, does.
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  (#2) They Went Extinct From Eating Too Many Eggs

  According to an early 20th century paleontologist named George Wieland, the dinosaurs died off from eating too many eggs.

  No, this doesn’t mean they were all poisoned to death by bad egg salad. It means carnivorous dinosaurs ate so many fertilized dinosaur eggs from other species that dinosaurs as a whole went extinct. While there is some evidence that some dinosaurs did prey on eggs and even hatched baby dinosaurs, there’s no evidence it happened at such a extreme rate that it brought the whole species to its collective knees.
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  (#12) The Iguanadon Was A Quadruped

  The iguanodon is a bipedal plant-eater that’s actually fairly sharp-looking. This oddly proportioned, bulky quadruped drawn by Victorian biologist Richard Owen looks less like an actual dinosaur and more like something out of Dinosauri, a knock-off version The Land Before Time. The real iguanodon stands on its two hind legs and looks way more menacing than this sluggish guy. 
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  (#10) The T-Rex Was A Scavenger

  In 1993, paleontologist Jack Horner claimed the tyrannosaurus rex, usually known as a vicious predator, was actually a scavenger instead. Meaning, instead of hunting its own prey, it picked over corpses, kind of like a vulture. His evidence included the fact t-rex has huge nasal cavities making finding corpses easy, and that being enormous would be useful for chasing off other scavengers. 

  Neither of these facts eliminate the possibility the t-rex is a predator - being able to smell well helps with finding live prey too, and being huge comes in handy when attempting to murder and eat living beings. Meanwhile, not only do t-rexes have the strong jaws and razor sharp teeth perfect for taking down live prey, but there’s also a ton of fossil evidence suggesting other dinosaurs were in fact killed by them. 

  Horner doesn’t even take his own theory all that seriously. In his book, The Complete T-Rex, he says that “I’m not convinced that t-rex was only a scavenger. Though sometimes I will say so sometimes just to be contrary and get my colleagues arguing.”

  Despite this, some people still believe the t-rex is more hyena than lion. Maybe this is because it’s more fun to think of a gigantic scary monster picking at leftovers than it is to imagine it chasing down prey.

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