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

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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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  (#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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  (#3) Early Drawings Of The Megalosaurus Were Way Wrong

  The first dinosaur fossil to ever receive a name was the megalosaurus. Because it was the first, no one had a solid idea of what it would look like as an actual, living animal. In 1857, Samuel Goodrich came up with this bizarre, crocodile-like interpretation of the megalosaurus. The real megalosaurus stands upright, and looks much more like a common t-rex than a crocodile. While Goodrich can’t be faulted for being so far off from the modern interpretation, you have to admit, this drawing is pretty silly looking.
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  (#4) Dinosaurs Look Like The Lizards From 'Jurassic Park'

  When most people think about dinosaurs, they think of gigantic, scaly lizard beasts like those in the Jurassic Park franchise. These images, while iconic, aren’t terribly accurate. Rather than lizards, dinosaurs most closely resemble birds. 

  That’s right, birds. According to evidence from fossils, dinosaurs were probably covered in feathers. Not only did dinosaurs have feathers, but they also had respiratory systems that work the way that birds’ respiratory systems work today.  If you’re upset by this news because you think it makes dinosaurs look less bad-ass, take comfort in the words of paleontologist Robert Bakker, who describes the velociraptor as “the 20,000 pound roadrunner from Hell.”
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  (#5) Some Dinosaurs Had Brains In Their Butts

  Othniel Charles Marsh, also known as the man who brought us the nonexistent brontosaurus, believed the camarasaurus and the stegosaurus had brains in their butts. He thought this because they had a neural opening toward the bottom of their spines, and there had to be something there, right?

  While this sounds like complete nonsense, it’s actually not as out there as it seems. These huge dinosaurs, known as sauropods, had extremely tiny brains, especially considering the size of their bodies. An extra brain could control the legs and lower body parts. We still don’t know what the neural opening actually contained, but we do know for certain that it wasn’t a butt brain.
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  (#6) The Dinosaurs Died Off Because Of Cataracts

  In 1982, an ophthalmologist named L.R. Croft suggested that dinosaurs died of a terrible plague - cataracts. 

  While cataracts - a medical condition where the lenses of the eye become opaque - aren’t exactly fun, they’re not typically considered fatal. At worst, cataracts can cause blindness. 

  Heat can make cataracts grow faster, and Croft believed many dinosaurs were going blind before they hit sexual maturity. While this might result in fewer dinosaurs reproducing, it wouldn’t make it completely impossible. It also doesn’t even begin to explain why all non-avian dinosaurs went extinct en masse 65 million years ago. 
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  (#7) Advanced Dinosaurs Rule Alien Worlds

  Dr. Ronald Breslow, a chemistry professor at Columbia University, claims a study he conducted on the chemistry of amino acids implies that, if life does exist on other planets, said life could be an advanced version of our dinosaurs. Some scientists believe the amino acids dominating earth’s lifeforms arrived to us via meteorite 4 billion years ago. If this happened on earth, Breslow believes it could also have happened on other planets, which could lead to the development similar life forms.

  Other scientists, such as Dr. Paul “PZ” Myers, associate professor of biology at the University of Minnesota Morris, believe this is is a nonsense theory with no proof whatsoever behind it. 
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  (#8) Dinosaurs Farted Themselves To Death

  There's a real theory that dinosaurs had so much flatulence they created a methane cloud that killed them off. Researchers calculated how much methane gas enormous sauropods could have produced in their lifetimes, and figured it could have been enough to warm the planet. While this might have been enough to influence the climate, the researchers were not intending to imply this actually killed any dinosaurs. However, the media jumped on the study, misinterpreted it, and the idea that dinosaurs farted themselves to death took hold.
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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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  (#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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  (#11) All Dinosaurs Were Green And Brown

  For some reason, most of the early paintings of dinosaurs were drab shades of green and brown. Up until recently, scientists didn’t know how to determine what color dinosaurs actually were from the fossil record, but that doesn’t explain the boring choice.

  Although many of us still think of dinosaurs as looking like they’re wearing army fatigues, the truth is they’re much more vibrant. Because some dinosaurs have feathers, which unlike skin is actually preserved in fossils, scientists could analyze those feathers for traces of melanin. We now know that some dinosaurs have stripes and spots, and that they can be black, white, or even orange.
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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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  (#13) All Mammals Lived In Fear Of Dinosaurs

  The standard story about dinosaurs and mammals is that dinosaurs preyed so intensely upon mammals they were barely able to evolve past being small and rodent-like until dinosaurs went extinct. While it’s true mammals flourished in the post-dinosaur world, mammals did fight back against their dinosaur aggressors.

  The repenomamus, a three-foot-long badger-like carnivore, was found with the remains of a baby dinosaur in its stomach. The repenomamus could take down more than just the babies, though - it was a match for smaller, feathered dinosaurs as well. While not all mammals were capable of defeating dinosaurs, others, like the multituberculates, happily scavenged dinosaur corpses.
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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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