Random Myths You Were Taught About Dinosaurs (21 items)

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  (#18) Dinosaurs Were Slow And Lumbering

  Many movies and TV shows have depicted dinosaurs as slow, lumbering beasts due to the immense size of some of them. Most dinosaurs were probably as mobile as large, modern mammals. A 2000 study of a well-preserved hadrosaur fossil suggested that dinosaurs had powerful hearts more like those of birds or mammals than modern reptiles, so they had higher metabolisms and were more active.
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  (#10) Dinosaurs Dragged Their Tails

  A lot of older museum exhibits of dinosaurs assembled the bones so that the tails were dragging on the ground, like Godzilla. This is one myth the Jurassic Park movies helped dispel, because the tails were lifted off the ground and aided in balance.

  There is no evidence of "tail traces" in fossils of dinosaur footprints.
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  (#15) Dinosaurs Were All Equally Stupid

  It's true that the stegosaurus has a walnut-sized brain and that most herbivores were probably not much smarter than the plants they munched on. But meat eaters, like the allosaurus, had larger brains and one theropod, Troodon, must have seemed like a genius compared to his peers.
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  (#14) Dinosaurs Were The First Reptiles To Rule The Earth

  Since a lot of people just assume that any ancient reptile is a dinosaur, then dinosaurs must have been the first reptiles to rule the Earth. Not true. The first reptiles evolved from their amphibian ancestors during the Carboniferous period some 300 million years ago.

  The first true dinosaurs didn't appear until about 230 million years ago.
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  (#7) Anything Prehistoric And Reptilian Was A Dinosaur

  A lot of people assume that any animal that is extinct and reptilian is a dinosaur, but that's just not true. Dinosaurs were just one lineage within a group called archosaurs, which also includes pterosaurs and crocodiles. They all split from each other some 245 million years ago.

  Although they lived alongside dinosaurs, the long-necked, swimming plesiosaurs (pictured), flying pterosaurs and other giant reptiles were not dinosaurs.
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  (#4) Dinosaurs Were Cold Blooded

  For decades scientists believed that dinosaurs were cold blooded like modern reptiles. But Australian scientists stated that if the dinosaurs did have cold blood they would not have had the muscular power to prey on other animals.

  As more evidence is found that shows that dinosaurs were fast-moving carnivores, it is more likely that they were warm blooded like their avian descendants.

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