They should understand the difference between animals we can't see anymore that did once exist extinct animals and animals we can't see that have never existed mythical animals. Ask the students if it would be possible for them to have an actual dinosaur or an actual dragon as a pet.
Be sure they realize that both scenarios are impossible. Make a chart on the board. Label the columns "dinosaur" and "dragon". They changed it to "Fire Saurian" in the US release, probably thinking nobody would know what it meant, and if they did, they wouldn't care.
They were right. Monster Hunter : For the most part, the setting's wyverns are simply that — purely draconic monsters with no particular links to dinosaurs.
However, two particular families of wyverns, the Bird Wyverns and the Brute Wyverns, resemble real-life dinosaurs more than they do any actual dragon. Most Bird Wyverns are Feathered Dragons that resemble, well, birds — some to the point of being essentially actual birds with a few draconic characteristics.
Several other such wyverns, though, are for all intents and purposes stereotypical, featherless raptorial dinosaurs. Later generations, however, mix these two categories with wyverns such as Maccao that strongly resemble real-life feathered dinosaurs. Brute Wyverns are powerfully built, flightless, bipedal creatures, most of which tend to use Tyrannosaurus rex and other bulky theropods as their base form.
So far though, only one of them has a Breath Weapon. The Anjanath in World resembles a fire-breathing T. Monster in My Pocket : Tyrannosaurus rex breathes fire. Thanks to The Wiki Rule , it can be identified as " super-heated plasma from his mouth, known as atomic breath. The one Drago that falls victim to the Pig Army's chimerization plot gains the ability to breathe fire.
Though from the looks of its sprite, it appears that they just shoved a flamethrower down its throat. Also, it is possible to teach fire-breathing to many other creatures that bear no resemblance to dragons or dinosaurs. The Dragon-type Haxorus line is based on dinosaurs, according to Word of God. More specifically, it was mainly based on herbivorous dinosaurs from appearances, that includes ceratopsians and possibly some pachycephalosaurids , and lo and behold, it's stated to be a herbivore itself.
In the first game, the Dragon type consisted exclusively of the Dratini-Dragonair-Dragonite line. Dragon-type trainer Lance's team thus needed some additions — including Aerodactyl. Aerodactyl is this Trope on itself, only played on Pterosaurs instead of Dinosaurs.
It's based on a Pterodactyl, but looks like a wyvern. Plays straight with the egg groups however. Nearly all reptiles are part of the Dragon egg group. If you choose to get technical, Altaria could qualify, seeing as it's a bird and birds are dinosaurs that also happens to be Dragon-type.
Portal Runner : Pteranodons in the Jurassic world shoot fireballs at you. Prehistoric Isle : The final boss of Prehistoric Isle in is a gigantic, fire-breathing Tyrannosaurus rex encountered at the bottom of a volcano. Primal Rage : Diablo is a fire-breathing Tyrannosaurus rex named Diablo. He's a God of Evil in the shape of a T.
This applies to nearly all the monsters in the game. They are ancient gods known as the Draconians yet most of them resemble dinosaurs. However, they aren't dinosaurs. They just '''look''' like dinosaurs and were even stated to have caused the extinction of the actual dinosaurs in the game's storyline. Radical Rex : The title character breathes fire as his main weapon. Sands of Destruction : Rhi'a's personal quest has you freeing her ancestor from a curse that's keeping him a zombie.
Naturally, this ancient dragon bears a striking resemblance to a T. Rhi'a's grandfather appearing as a skeleton is also likely meant to bring fossils to mind, because Everything's Better with Dinosaurs! In The Sims 4 , there is a large stuffed dinosaur named Drago and a large stuffed dragon named Dino. The Flavor Text for these items mentions that the children naming them mixed them up. Skylanders : Bash is classified as an Earth dragon. The fact that he's without wings and fire breath can be attributed to the fact that he's affiliated with Earth , but he also has an ankylosaur-like mace tail and ceratopsian-style frilled head; and he can even get a horned helmet that is explicitly modeled on a Triceratops.
Dino-Rang is a dinosaur-man who gets rather peeved when he's mistaken for a dragon. Sonic the Hedgehog 2 : Hidden Palace's T. Unfortunately, they and the other dinos in that level were invincible obstacles, not robotic animals, and therefore you could not possess them. He can't breathe fire or fly on his own, but occasional power-ups can give him those abilities.
Brawl puts him firmly in dragon territory — he grows wings, becomes invincible, and flies around the screen breathing fire. It's even called the "Super Dragon". Super Mario World , besides introducing Yoshi to the series, has it so that when Mario or Luigi stomps on a Dino-Rhino on Chocolate Island, it shrinks and becomes a Dino-Torch, which breathes fire upward.
There is also the boss enemy Reznor, four fireball-spitting Triceratops spinning on a waterwheel. Everything on Dinosaur Land the setting of World is closer to a dragon than to a dinosaur. The Rex enemy doesn't look at all like a T. Bowser looks like a dinosaur Star Fox Adventures : Tricky the sorta- Styracosaurus breathes fire and burrows underground. In Tales of Eternia , one can encounter dinosaurs. They're big green lizardy things with tiny arms and lots of teeth.
Also, they breathe fire. Making it worse, elsewhere, one can find actual dragons, which are exactly like red Dinosaurs with tiny wings. Tales of Symphonia has a science academy which contains the assembled skeleton of a dragon on display. A nearby scholar indicates that it was a prehistoric creature that lived long ago. Nevertheless, many varieties of real, living dragons exist in the game, including both winged and non-winged varieties, some of which have even been domesticated for human use.
Unfortunately for the scientists, they mostly live in places that they are unlikely to ever see. Touhou : According to Morichika Rinnosuke in Curiosities of Lotus Asia , the world outside of Gensokyo has been re-naming dragon fossils as various types of dinosaurs.
However, it should be noted Rinnosuke is well-known for making up his own theories about the curiosities he collects. Turok averts this trope by having a Dinosaur with bionic enhancements; flamethrowers situated at the Tyrannosaur's head spit fire, making it look similar to a dragon.
Warcraft : Mostly averted. There are several creatures that look like dinosaurs or other prehistoric reptiles, most notably devilsaurs T. Most don't breathe fire, but many stegodon variants called thunder lizards shoot lightning out of their horn. A lot of these are also commonly found in areas with lots of lava. In World of Warcraft , dinosaurs are clearly labeled "beasts" instead of "dragonkin". Also, just to be fair, while few people know this, it is heavily implied in some tauren quests that the "thunder lizards" lightning shooting stegodons are not dinosaurs, but magical beasts that Blizz just reused the model of for the stegodons of a different sort.
When you finally meet the man Maxamillian of Northshire it turns out the dragons are, well, dinosaurs. While dinosaurs and dragons are clearly separate units every race potentially has access to dragons, while dinos are Ssrathi melee units , the Dragonslayer class has a skill that grants bonus XP to both dragon and dinosaur units Xenoblade Chronicles has fiery and electric dinosaurs called Deinos.
Also, the Nopon call the winged, three-headed Telethia "dinobeast" but their English isn't the best. Web Animation. Though as stated in the Video Games folder above, Diablo is not a dinosaur, but rather a demonic god that just so happens to resemble a T-Rex. Homestar Runner : A "Powered by the Cheat" animation shows a The Cheat-like dinosaur drinking out of a volcano and breathing fire at one point. Coach Z Pterodactyl : The Cheatsaurus can do it again!
There's a scene in The Ultimate Battle arc that lampshades this. Axe Cop explains that Wexter must be transformed into a dragon and, at Sockarang's protests "He can already fly and breath fire! In El Goonish Shive , George is asked if dragons are real and essentially claims this trope as the answer justifying it with the declaration that they were magic. Amusingly, he then claims that the reason pterodactyls are not dinosaurs is because they didn't fly with magic.
The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob! The dragons destroyed their civilization in a war — wiping out the dinosaurs in the process — after which they became peaceful, pastoral creatures. Millions of years later, when human knights and hunters began "slaying" them, they revived their old technology and left Earth for the planet Butane in the Kuiper Belt.
Web Original. Dragon Cave : While most of the dragons are fully based on classical mythology either Eastern or Western style , this is played straighter with the "wyverns", a sub-category of Western dragons whose have wings in the place of arms, giving the impression of a flying, magical velociraptor. There are also the inexplicable actual dinosaurs that very rarely show up, but those are shout-outs to Yoshi. In an interview with the Brazilian dubber for Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom namely, of Zia , she states that she cries a lot during "the scene where the little dragon stays behind".
Western Animation. Or rather Prof. Rotwood had the theory that dragons were evolutions of the dinosaurs. Being the American Dragon, Jake knew this was a bunch of hooey. DC Animated Universe : The subtler versions of this trope pop up a few times. Additionally, it's clear that all the animal-specific shapeshifters had a mixer and decided that Tyrannosaurus rex would be their go-to One-Winged Angel form.
Doc McStuffins : Played with — when Stuffy toy dragon and Bronty toy brontosaurus meet, Doc says that they are like family and that they could be cousins. In a later installment, Bronty refers to Stuffy as "Cousin Stuffy. The Dragon Tales book release Dinosaurs and Dragons takes this and plays it for all that it's worth. They were initially gigantic snake-like dragons.
The initial lore was prophetic, and Merlin was involved in its telling. Warlord Vortigern was trying to build a fortress on the mountain for the defense of the Welsh people. The fortress kept collapsing, and Merlin explained that the construction was placed on a swamp were two dragons resided. Upon draining the swamp, two gigantic dragons emerged fighting. However, Merlin promised that one day, Welsh people would triumph over Englishmen and attain their freedom back. In , a hand-painted illustration of a dragon with two pairs of wings emerged.
The dragon was much like what Middle Eastern and Germanic lore described such beasts, but the two pairs of wings were unique. Just like other lore, the dragon was in a swampy and river-valley area. The dragon was breathing fire while in full flight. The legends regarding dragons are also entrenched in the Roman-Christian religion: Saint George and the Dragon. In the legend, the dragon dwelt near a lake and had a ferocious appetite. It ate a shepherd, and the people started offering it two sheep daily.
They started offering their children when the dragon ate all the sheep. They eventually offered the royal princess to the dragon as a meal, but Saint George interrupted the meal. He maimed the dragon by stabbing it with his mighty lance and showing it the symbol of the cross. He then displayed the dragon to the people and promised to kill it on one condition; the Libyan settlement had to convert into Christianity. The medieval gargoyles present other evidence of past European beliefs of dragons.
A French fable accuses a fearsome dragon of causing floods and attacking ships on the ancient river the Seine. People offered human sacrifices to the dragon annually to appease its devastating temperament.
They built a church when Priest Romanus required it them as a condition to slay the dragon. He went to kill the beast and mounted its head on the church. It became the first-ever gargoyle. The Chinese dragon is, perhaps, one of the most popular dragons in history. The Chinese loved dragons, and they appreciate the creatures still to this date.
Most Chinese dragons were just as powerful, but they were additionally wise and noble. The symbol of dragons still represents abundance and prosperity. Dragons are regarded as the highest in the Chinese animal hierarchy even though they are just mythical creatures. Despite the love for the dragon, no dragon fossils have ever been found. What comes close, however, are winged fossils with large claws or long-shaped bodies.
According to the BBC. These creatures date back as far as the Bronze Age ritual vessels. Such vessels narrate the prestigious practice of rearing dragons. Back then, a certain young man could understand the will of dragons, and he was loyal to Emperor Shun. In another legend, a hero by the name Fu Hsi came across a horse dragon when he was crossing the Lo River.
This earlyth-century depiction might be off in a few details — the pterosaurs' trunks look a bit stout and their necks a bit short — but the general picture is right. But paired with the prehistoric pteranodons are some very modern-looking birds: a seagull standing by the shore and what might be a cockatoo in flight. Year: Artist: George Howman Originally appeared as: "Flying Dragon found at Lyme Regis, supposed to be noctivagous" painting Now appears in: The Earth on Show by Ralph O'Connor "Noctivagous" means wandering at night, and the Reverend Howman inscribed on the back of his nighttime painting that it was based on an account of a "flying dragon" fossil by William Buckland.
Buckland's paper was about a pterodactyl fossil. Howman portrayed the pterosaur as a dragon, complete with a pointy tail, and put it into a present-day landscape, embellished with castle ruins and a listing ship. As flying reptiles, pterosaurs probably counted among the most puzzling fossils encountered by scientists in the early 19th century. At the same time scientists struggled to understand pterosaur appearance and behavior, artists such as Howman struggled to depict the animals in life.
Howman erred on the side of dragons and time travel. Aside from all the other vexing problems about pterosaurs Were they bats, birds, or reptiles? And how did they get off the ground? In his book about the history of life, Figuier reproduced Riou's reconstruction of pterosaur terrestrial locomotion.
Riou believed he had found the evidence of how long-tailed pterosaurs moved — on all fours, tails dragging behind them — in tracks preserved in the Solnhofen limestone. It wasn't a bad approach; paleontologists often find clues to animal movement preserved in tracks, but Riou was wrong about the kind of animal that left those tracks. The tail dragging was really the work of horseshoe crabs. Some horseshoe crabs had the good manners to clarify their identities by simply dying at the ends of their tracks, and such "death march" fossils left little doubt.
The identity of the track maker was only settled in about , and just how pterosaurs move on the ground remained a topic of debate throughout the 20th century.
Newer evidence indicates that Riou was at least correct about their quadrupedal gait. Richard Owen, who championed and oversaw the project, wanted a "cathedral to nature," and the building's German Romanesque style very much resembles a cathedral to religion.
This pterosaur sculpture on the front of the museum bears no small resemblance to a gargoyle, hunched on almost human-looking hind legs. In his cathedral to nature, Owen insisted on the segregation of extinct and extant animals, putting still-living species in the west wing, and long-dead species in the east wing. Owen was a progressive creationist who believed that the Earth had seen a series of complete extinctions followed by game-over-new-game resets.
But as he insisted that extinct and extant species had no relation to each other, Darwin's theory of natural selection was gaining ground. Lescaze describes Vatagin's paintings as the earliest depictions prehistoric reptiles displayed in Russia.
Vatagin's pterosaurs must have been crowd-pleasers; they were pugnacious, scary monsters now safely extinct. Like earlier pterosaur reconstructions, Vatagin's images have some flaws: torsos too heavy to loft into the air, and wing membranes encompassing the hind legs and tails.
The jagged teeth aren't pure fabrication, though; plenty of pterosaur fossils preserve teeth that menacing. The forked tongues are more conjectural. Rudwick The author of this illustration was De la Beche. The target was Charles Lyell. Lyell argued for uniformitarianism: geologic processes occurring today, such as floods, earthquakes and erosion, are the same as those that occurred millions, even billions of years ago, and can account for landscapes as varied as the Alps and the Grand Canyon.
Uniformitarianism is widely accepted among geologists today. Likewise, it's perfectly reasonable to think that, just as some parts of the globe were balmy or frigid millions of years ago, they may well be balmy or frigid millions of years in the future. But Lyell took that thinking an improbable step further, claiming, "huge Iguanodon might reappear in the woods, and the ichthyosaurs in the sea, while pterodactyle might flit again through umbrageous groves of tree ferns.
The caption for this cartoon reads, "'You will at once perceive,' continued Professor Ichthyosaurus, 'that the skull before us belonged to some of the lower order of animals, the teeth are very insignificant the power of the jaws trifling, and altogether it seems wonderful how the creature could have procured food. Rudwick Figuier and Riou added this image to the fourth edition of Earth Before the Deluge , and it features an example of Hylaeosaurus and two examples of Teleosaurus , one of whom, unfortunately, is dead.
Riou's hylaeosaur is a little more accurate than what Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins produced for Richard Owen at Crystal Palace , but it doesn't quite match a modern understanding of ankylosaurs. The teleosaurs are closer to a modern interpretation, with their long, thin snouts, and they may very well have feasted on squid.
The deceased individual floats rather comically on the water surface, limbs akimbo, but showing one specimen belly-up gives the reader a view of its belly. At least he thought they were birds. Hitchcock actually produced beautifully engraved but wrongly identified dinosaur tracks.
Rudwick According to 19th-century artist John Martin, dinosaurs spent much of their lives engaged in belching contests. Martin, an exceptionally talented artist whose paintings on biblical and classical subjects include The Fall of Babylon , Belshazzar's Feast and Deluge , later turned his efforts to scientific subjects, after his celebrity had waned, and familial and financial problems had accumulated.
Unfortunately, he never let the facts get in the way of a good picture. Martin's contemporaries certainly lacked his sense of drama. Then again, he lacked their sense of accuracy. Contemporaries of dinosaurs, plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs were giant sea-dragons in his opinion, and his collaborator Martin accommodated that vision perfectly. The sea-dragons weren't just big, strong and hungry, Hawkins argued, they were evil. After describing one fossil, Hawkins explained to his readers the work of paleontologists: "By such inductions we revive the habits of Creatures long vanished away, and recolor the ardent Monster fleeting through the expanse of Seas like lightning to his distant prey, with a lust quenchable alone in gore.
Hawkins's eccentric take on the ancient Earth didn't end with mean monsters. He was also confident that the planet was bathed in darkness. He doubted the sun even existed the days of his sea-dragons, and if it did, its light couldn't penetrate our planet's murky atmosphere. Dark days indeed. Dean Martin's painting of this scene has not survived, but this watercolor and subsequent engravings have.
The engraving of Martin's work served as the frontispiece of Mantell's book — written in a less dramatic tone than Thomas Hawkins's apocalyptic tome on "sea-dragons.
An Iguanodon attacked by a Megalosaurus and Crocodile constitute the principal group; in the middle distance an Iguanodon and Hylaeosaurus are preparing for an encounter; a solitary Pterodactyl, or flying reptile, with its wings partly expanded, forms a conspicuous object in the foreground while tortoises are seen crawling on the banks of the river. Ammonites and other shells of the Portland Oolite, which is the foundation rock of the country, are strewn on the shore.
At Tilgate Quarry, Mantell had discovered plant fossils, including ferns and conifers. The dinosaurs in this image, though, bear the dueling-dragon look typical of Martin's other pictures. Rudwick This image shows a lush Cretaceous landscape, and provides another example of Gideon Mantell's iguanodons — again looking like giant lizards, again with their horns misplaced — but likely showing an event that must have happened: boys fighting over a girl. Compared to more modern reconstructions, this illustration shows a Struthiosaurus with a neck a little too long, a head a little too smooth and dainty, and a tail a little to dragging.
But the mistakes in this image are minor, and Nopcsa was well ahead of his time in understanding dinosaur biology, dinosaur ancestry of birds, and island dwarfing. The aristocratic scientist, would-be king of Albania and occasional imperial spy grew fascinated with dinosaurs as a teenager when his sister handed him some fossil bones she found on a walk near a family home.
Over the years, Nopcsa authored many scientific papers on fossils, often including his own illustrations. In fact, these winsome creatures were part of a larger diagram placing fossil organisms in their geologic context, and not a bad job for the time, except that they look a bit like dragons.
Year: Scientists: Joseph Leidy and E. Cope Artist: Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins Originally appeared in: Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia Now appears in: Joseph Leidy: The Last Man Who Knew Everything by Leonard Warren Dinosaurs didn't generally need to hang onto trees for support, but in all fairness, this was a pretty good articulation — and the first relatively complete dinosaur skeleton known to science.
Unfortunately, the skull was missing. Hawkins, pictured standing under the skeleton, mocked up a giant iguana skull, and painted it green for this display. Although the formidable comparative anatomist Sir Richard Owen maintained that dinosaurs walked on all fours, Joseph Leidy realized that the small size of the hadrosaur's forelimbs suggested that it was bipedal. This articulation, now widely accepted, lent credence to T.
Huxley's theory that birds evolved from dinosaurs. Though paleontologists had given up the image of dinosaurs as oversized lizards decades earlier, he sometimes persisted in depicting them as such.
These lizard-like creatures figured into his depiction of Jurassic life. Note the tiny visitors in the lower right corner. The dragon-like dinosaurs look like they're up to no good. But although their reconstruction was far more accurate that other saurian reconstruction attempts — including Waterhouse Hawkins's own work at Crystal Palace Park in the s — scientific understanding of the animal's posture was still being refined, and its skull was still based on that of a modern-day iguana's.
Marching single-file to the shore, the hadrosaurs in this image look a bit like actors in lizard-man costumes in a low-budget sci-fi thriller.
The poor things are fleeing an attack from a pack of Laelaps Dryptosaurus dinosaurs. The painting suggests that the hadrosaurs may not be any safer in the water, which teems with monstrous ichthyosaurs and sinister, snake-necked plesiosaurs. Lescaze observes that this working shows Waterhouse Hawkins's "Romantic fascination with the sublime desolation of deep time.
A close look shows that not one but two prehistoric monsters are just coming ashore. An even closer look shows that they are leading an improbable procession of similar beasts stretching far into the distance. First, he had to persuade himself and his contemporaries that the tooth was reptilian. Once the great French naturalist Cuvier wondered whether Mantell might have "a new animal, an herbivorous reptile? Iguanas aren't native to England, and museum specimens were rare when Mantell went looking.
Once he did find a modern analogue, and formally named Iguanodon in , artists went all in on scaled-up iguanas. This fossil reptile even has a dewlap. Overall, the cards took their inspiration from earlier depictions done in Britain and America.
This dragon-like Iguanodon resembles John Martin's work from the early s, complete with its horned snout and forked tongue. By the time this little card saw the light of day, Martin-style lizard- and dragon-like depictions had been discarded in favor of more accurate representations.
Still, a dinosaur, even an inaccurate one, makes a better trading card than a ball player. Century: Late 19th Inspired by: E. In contrast to the dragon-like dinosaur inspired by the work of John Martin, this card bears a picture that was more up to date, at least at the time of its release.
It shows a leaping little theropod, Laelaps. Laelaps has been reworked since the late 19th century, including trading in its kangaroo posture and its name. The species is now known as Dryptosaurus because the coveted name of Laelaps — evocative of powerful winds — had already been assigned to a much-less-deserving mite. The chapter titled "The Age of Monsters" opened with this "pre-Adamite," reminiscent of the Crystal Palace dinosaurs , menacing a frightened human explorer.
Brough likened dinosaurs to dragons and, perhaps not knowing how right he was, griffins. Brough's "Age of Monsters" reads like a Rocky and Bullwinkle Fractured Fairy Tale; by the second page, a fastidious monster is ordering a princess for dinner.
Illustrations in the book closely followed earlier depictions, so these pictures of Megalosaurus , Iguanodon and Hylaeosaurus are clearly based on Crystal Palace Park sculptures executed by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins and overseen by Richard Owen. Repeating the Crystal Palace Park descriptions, these illustrations repeat the mistakes that wouldn't be corrected until more complete specimens were found. But the mistakes are pretty forgivable.
As the British Library explains, the publisher, Routledge, aimed to make science education available to Victorian Britain's less affluent. Designed to fit well into one's hand or pocket, the books often sold for just one or two shillings. Note the price printed across the top of the book cover. In the midth century, a shilling amounted to 12 pence — still out of reach for the very poorest, but reasonable for many others.
Illustrations of any kind were a bonus. By the time a Swiss chocolate company issued this trading card, more extensive fossil finds had long overturned the body shape and posture that Hawkins had produced in the midth century for the Crystal Palace models. By the late 19th century, paleontologists understood that Iguanodon had longer hind legs than front legs, and that the horn that had once adorned its reconstructed snout really was a thumb spike.
But if the chocolate is tasty, a few mistakes in a colorful complimentary trading card can be forgiven.
This scene is part of Emslie's larger artwork embellishing a meandering path through geological periods with whimsical illustrations. In the larger broadside, Silurian life appears at the bottom and Tertiary life appears at the top.
As with other popular-interest publications about geology in Victorian times, "antediluvian" didn't mean before the flood so much as before people. Year: Artist: Charles R. Based on only a few fragments, the earliest reconstruction of Iguanodon showed a giant lizard. In the nearly years since Gideon Mantell first described Iguanodon , paleontologists have collected skeletons of adults and juveniles, and studied tracks of these similar groups of ornithopod dinosaurs. They are now understood to have been bipedal, walking on their large hind limbs with their tails stretching out behind them.
Toward the end of the 19th century, hadrodaurs were slowly lumbering toward a more accurate reconstruction, but they weren't quite there yet. Knight's illustration shows an animal with a tail that could double as a chair.
In the s, the fossil reptile was reconstructed as a stout quadruped. Easy to chuckle at today, the early mistakes were understandable because 19th-century scientists had so few remains on which to base their reconstructions. But in , coal miners discovered dozens of Iguanodon skeletons in Bernissart, Belgium.
The rich assemblage of complete skeletons enabled unprecedented accuracy in Iguanodon mounts, including transforming the snot horn to its proper place as a thumb spike. But a few errors remained, such as the tripod pose. Louis de Pauw supervised the reconstruction of the dinosaur at the Paris Museum of Natural History, and this small reconstruction of the landscape, an electroplated relief, appeared at the skeleton's feet.
Knight Now appears at: T. His earlyth-century depiction of Tyrannosaurus rex showed the "tyrant lizard" with an upright posture, balancing on its substantial hind legs and ready to rest on its tail.
This image dominated for decades; in , the American Museum of Natural History featured a miniature, portable exhibit of T.
Another was the earlyth-century hypothesis that sauropod dinosaurs habitually hung out in water. This pastel picture shows a herd of Brontosaurus venturing into s marshy water body. Paleontologists now realize that water pressure on a sauropod thorax would outweigh any benefit from buoyancy.
Far more people have been injured in Yellowstone National Park by bison than by grizzly bears. In Africa, hippos are widely regarded as the most dangerous large animals. Big herbivores are dangerous.
Megalosaurus was the first formally described extinct reptile, named by William Buckland in Iguanodon was the second dinosaur species, named in by Gideon Mantell. This image shows hints of Iguanodon's thumb spike, relocated from its erroneous position on the animal's snout, but other than that, it's tough to tell the carnivorous Megalosaurus and herbivorous Iguanodon apart.
Here, they form a pair of snarling, dueling tripods. Much of Messmore and Damon's business came from department stores, where animated window displays were big hits, especially at Christmastime. In the s, they built an automated sauropod in their workshop, giving it the ability to swing its neck from side to side, bat its eyelids, and move its mouth. The display, depicted in Popular Mechanics , mingled animated dinosaurs with Ice Age mammals and cave men — all the prehistoric crowd pleasers they could stuff into a single hall, regardless of the fact that they didn't live at the same time.
A few animal descriptions were a bit off; exhibit text described the pterosaur as a "gigantic ancestor of the bat family. Manias explains that most exhibit attendees — even or especially the kids — knew that dinosaurs and prehistoric humans didn't live at the same time, but exhibit text carefully danced around the topic of human evolution. The cost of the exhibit was roughly half the budget of the movie King Kong , and much more than the annual budget of the AMNH vertebrate paleontology department.
To recoup their costs, Messmore and Damon needed to attract 1. After , the business partners looked for ways to keep the money coming, revamping "The World a Million Years Ago" and renaming it "Down the Lost River.
Messmore and Damon even staged a nudist wedding in the revamped exhibit, but it didn't go smoothly, and an errant glyptodont knocked one of the nudists into the water.
In , the enterprising pair sold sheet music. Of course no dinosaur would still be alive to dance with a naked girl 1 million years ago, any girl living 1 million years ago would be sporting some serious brow ridges. Oh well. Among those achievements was the realization that giant reptiles walked an ancient Earth; in , nobody had heard of dinosaurs. Fair organizers constructed an Iguanodon statue for the festivities.
It wasn't entirely accurate, though, retaining the tripod posture typically assigned to duckbilled dinosaurs. But give the Exposition Universelle organizers credit; they already knew what draws millions of visitors to museums more than a century later: dinosaurs and ancient Egypt. Hoping to find human ancestors, the expeditions instead found dinosaur fossils, including the first recognized dinosaur eggs. In , expedition member George Olsen found a clutch of eggs.
Starting to brush dirt away from his find, as Andrews later recounted, Olsen found a small theropod just inches away. The site was rich in Protoceratops remains, so the little theropod seemed likely to be a thief. Back in New York, Osborn named the theropod Oviraptor philoceratops. The generic name means "egg seizer" and the specific name means "fondness for ceratopsian eggs. Pictured here is an accurate illustration of a mangled skull of a misnamed dinosaur. Political changes in Mongolia and decades of Cold War tensions kept American researchers out of the Gobi for several decades.
When AMNH researchers returned in the s, they found more dinosaur eggs, including one egg that was close to hatching when it fossilized. The embryo turned out to be an Oviraptor. The little dinosaur hadn't been stealing ceratopsian eggs after all. It had likely been protecting its own. Because the eggs turned up near Protoceratops remains, the logical assumption was that they belonged to that species.
Another logical assumption was that dinosaurs, being reptiles, let their young fend for themselves. So, in , when AMNH researcher George Olsen uncovered a small theropod skeleton right next to the eggs, it looked like an egg thief caught red-clawed tens of millions of years later, and it got an egg-thieving name: Oviraptor.
Perfectly reasonable assumptions can prove to be wrong, though. Seven decades after the initial discovery, and four decades after Andrews published his popular account, another AMNH expedition found an embryo inside a fossil egg — and found it belonged to Oviraptor. Andrews didn't know that when he wrote All About Dinosaurs , so the book includes this illustration of splay-legged ceratopsian hatchlings.
The caption reads, "Baby dinosaurs as they may have looked coming from eggs. The sauropod specimen shown here was Diplodocus longus , collected in the s. What's a little surprising about this setting isn't what it shows but what it was named. It wasn't known as the hall of prehistoric life, or the dinosaur hall, or the gallery of ancient reptiles. It was the Hall of Extinct Monsters.
Setting up the park provided work for people who needed it, and the park provided recreation for dinosaur-loving kids. Whether the sculptures provided much accuracy is another matter. Putting aside T.
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