Behold The Mighty Dinosaur

BEHOLD THE
MIGHTY
DINOSAUR
COURSE GUIDE
Professor John Kricher

WHEATON COLLEGE
Behold the Mighty Dinosaur
Wheaton College
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Course Syllabus
About Your Professor/Introduction ...............................................................................4
Lecture 1 What Is (or Was) a Dinosaur? ...............................................................6
Lecture 2 Digging Up Dinos...................................................................................9
Lecture 3 Dinosaurs Discovered..........................................................................12
Lecture 4 The Bone Wars....................................................................................16
Lecture 5 The Museum That Dinosaurs Built ......................................................19
Lecture 6 Dinosaurs Enter Pop Culture...............................................................23
Lecture 7 Dinosaur Origins ..................................................................................27
Lecture 8 In the Days of Dinosaurs .....................................................................31
Lecture 9 Dinosaur Diversity................................................................................35
Lecture 10 Dinosaurs Become Dynamic ...............................................................39
Lecture 11 Dinosaurs Become Airborne................................................................43
Lecture 12 Dinosaurs as Living Animals ...............................................................48
Lecture 13 T. REX Deconstructed and Reconstructed ...........................................52
Lecture 14 The Cretaceous Extinction Event ........................................................57
Course Materials ........................................................................................................62
3
About Your Professor
John Kricher
John Kricher is a professor of biology
at Wheaton College, Norton, Massachu-
setts. His books include Galapagos: A
Natural History, A Neotropical
Photo courtesy of John Kricher
Companion, three ecology field guides

(Eastern Forests; Rocky Mountain and
Southwestern Forests; and California
and Pacific Northwest Forests), and
First Guide to Dinosaurs. John is a fel-
low in the American Ornithologists
Union and past-president of both the Association of Field Ornithologists and
Wilson Ornithological Society. His interest in dinosaurs has taken him to vir-
tually all of the major museum collections and he has “hunted dinosaurs” in
Connecticut, Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, Montana, and along the Red Deer
River in Alberta. He teaches about dinosaurs in his classes and he has
amassed a large private collection of dinosaur models. He resides with his
wife Martha Vaughan on Cape Cod.
Introduction
Dinosaurs—the word means “fearfully great reptile”—have been a source of
fascination ever since their discovery in England early in the nineteenth cen-
tury. No human ever has or ever will see a live long-necked APATOSAURUS, the
odd-plated STEGOSAURUS, or the infamous TYRANNOSAURUS REX, yet common
birds such as cardinals and chickadees trace their ancestries back to
dinosaurs. Dinosaurs, once believed to be immense behemoths, dull of mind,
slow of body, mired in swamps like so many oversized sluggish lizards, have
reawakened interest, and research on dinosaurs has burgeoned.
Dinosaurs present the ultimate puzzle in forensic science. They excite our
curiosity, even our awe. Aside from birds, all dinosaurs have been extinct for
65 million years, yet, before then, they dominated Earth’s terrestrial habitats
for about 160 million years, far longer than primates, to say nothing of
humans, have been around. We have evidence of their existence and even
of their former lives, evidence in the form of bones, skulls, whole skeletons,
skin, trackways, eggs, nests, even feces. The puzzles about dinosaurs are
complex, but nonetheless we have learned a great deal about them, especial-
ly in the last fifty years. Our view of dinosaurs has changed radically, and the
evolution and biology of dinosaurs has become a popular topic in college cur-
riculums. This lecture series will explain how this changing view of dinosaurs
developed and what it means to evolutionary biology.
4
Beginning with the discovery and initial interpretation of dinosaurs, we will
come to understand why these unique animals were initially thought to be
large lizards but were soon realized to be in a group of their own. We will
learn of the great finds of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries
and the infamous “bone wars” fought between two driven geniuses to estab-
lish supremacy as dinosaur collectors. We will follow the great dinosaur
collectors through the American West and on to Mongolia in search of
fossil bones. The American Museum of Natural History in New York City
now houses the greatest collection of dinosaur skeletons, largely because it
was recognized early in the twentieth century that dinosaurs interest the
public and people will come to museums to see their remains.
Since their discovery, dinosaurs have been part of pop culture. Books and
films have featured and celebrated dinosaurs. Professor Kricher will detail
how dinosaur pop culture has evolved, including the great interest generated
by the release of the film Jurassic Park in 1993, soon followed by the highly
acclaimed BBC series Walking with Dinosaurs.
In the mid-1960s scientists began to view dinosaurs differently. Evidence
mounted, largely thanks to two paleontologists from Yale University, John
Ostrom and Robert Bakker, that dinosaurs were warm-blooded and active,
more like mammals and birds than like reptiles. At about the same time new
attention was given to the old notion that birds evolved from dinosaurs. Field
and lab studies burgeoned and Professor Kricher will discuss how the
“Dinosaur Renaissance” was achieved and how it resulted in a great rush of
new dinosaur exploration, excavation, research, and interpretation. Never
have dinosaurs been more a focus of science than they are today.
The lectures will explain evolutionary and ecological relationships among
dinosaurs and provide the listener with a sense of what it might have been
like to be present in the Mesozoic Era during the time of the dinosaurs. One
lecture will be devoted entirely to questions surrounding TYRANNOSAURUS REX
and the final lecture will deal with the question of what ultimately brought
about the total extinction of all of the non-bird dinosaurs.
5
Lecture 1:
What Is (or Was) a Dinosaur?
The Suggested Reading for this lecture is John Noble Wilford’s The
Riddle of the Dinosaur.
poem written less than a century after the discovery of

dinosaurs begins with the line, “Behold the mighty dinosaur,
famous in prehistoric lore.” Dinosaurs, a name that trans-
lates to “fearfully great reptile” (sometimes interpreted as
“terrible lizard”), have excited the public mind ever since
their discovery in the early nineteenth century. They
have been portrayed as immense in size, bizarre in
appearance, stupid of mind, impressively dangerous,
and, of course, totally extinct. Indeed, the name
“dinosaur” is sometimes applied to anything or anyone perceived to have out-
lived its usefulness. Dinosaurs have become icons of failure, the poster chil-
dren for extinction. At the same time, they continue to fascinate. And thanks
to advances in computer animation, films such as Jurassic Park and the BBC
series Walking with Dinosaurs virtually re-create these wondrous creatures of
the Mesozoic Era.
Were dinosaurs evolutionary failures? I say an emphatic “No!” and this lec-
ture series will hopefully convince you that dinosaurs were and, in the form of
birds, continue to be one of the most diverse and successful groups of back-
boned animals.
The poem The Riddle of the Dinosaur captures the mystique of these
remarkable animals. It is about a dinosaur named STEGOSAURUS, a creature
most children could identify. Bigger than the largest rhino, its back lined with
formidable bony plates, and a tail armed with four menacing bony spikes, this
animal is easily recognized. Add to that countenance its tiny head containing
a walnut-sized brain and you have the enigma of the dinosaur: large, bizarre,
stupid. STEGOSAURUS had a swelling in its vertebral column at its hips, indicat-
ing that its spinal cord was unusually thick in that region. This reality gave
rise to the fanciful notion that “the creature had two sets of brains,” the topic
of the poem.
Dinosaurs are among the only animals we know by their scientific rather
than common names. We don’t call it “roofed lizard,” we call it STEGOSAURUS.
We refer to ALLOSAURUS and ANATOTITAN, rather than “other lizard” and “big
duck.” Some dinosaurs have even been named more than once. The
dinosaur APATOSAURUS (meaning “deceptive lizard”) was once called
BRONTOSAURUS, a great name that translates to “thunder lizard.” But, alas, a
LECTURE ONE
bundle of bones was named APATOSAURUS before another bundle of bones

from a different individual of the same species was named BRONTOSAURUS, so
APATOSAURUS is the official scientific name. Perhaps the finest dinosaur name
of them all is TYRANNOSAURUS REX, the “king of tyrant lizards.”
6
Many dinosaurs were large, even huge, bigger than any other land animals
to have ever existed. Some of the largest weighed in excess of fifty tons. But
many were comparable in size to some of today’s mammals, such as ele-
phants, rhinos, and hippos. Some were rather small and some only the size
of chickens, weighing less than house cats. Many were indeed bizarre in
appearance and certainly many would be dangerous were they still roaming
the wilds today. And, yes, many were dumb, even by crocodile standards.
But not all were.
Are dinosaurs extinct? Their time, the Mesozoic Era, ended abruptly sixty-
five million years ago. Gone were the likes of T. REX and TRICERATOPS, per-
haps done in by the effects of a ten-kilometer asteroid striking the Earth. But
as these lectures will make clear, birds evolved from a lineage of dinosaurs.
Birds survived the big extinction event and thus only the so-called “non-avian
dinosaurs” became extinct. One group of dinosaurs survived, the birds, and
today nearly ten thousand feathered dinosaurs, more than twice the number
of mammal species, share our world.
The Riddle of the Dinosaur

by Bert Leston Taylor
(1866—1921)
Behold the mighty dinosaur, Each thought filled just one spinal column.
Famous in prehistoric lore, If one brain found the pressure strong
Not only for his power and strength It passed a few ideas along.
But for his intellectual length. If something slipped his forward mind
You will observe by these remains ’Twas rescued by the one behind
The creature had two sets of brains— And if an error he was caught
One in his head (the usual place), He had a saving afterthought.
The other at his spinal base. As he thought twice before he spoke
Thus he could reason ‘A Priori’ He had no judgment to revoke.
As well as ‘A Posteriori.’ Thus he could think without congestion.
No problem bothered him a bit Upon both sides of the question.
He made a head and tail of it. Oh, gaze upon this model beast,
So wise was he, so wise Defunct ten million years
and solemn, at least.
© Clipart.com
Source: The Edgar Rice Burroughs Library; http://www.erbzine.com/dan/t1.html
7

FOR GREATER UNDERSTANDING
Questions
1. Why are dinosaurs often viewed as “evolutionary failures”?

2. Why is this view not accurate?
Suggested Reading
Wilford, John Noble. The Riddle of the Dinosaur. New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1985.
Other Books of Interest
de Camp, L. Sprague, and Catherine Cook de Camp. The Day of the

Dinosaur. New York: Doubleday & Company, 1968.
Websites to Visit
The Dinosaur Corporation website Dinosaur Timeline Gallery features a col-

lection of dinosaur and prehistoric illustrations by paleo-artist Josef Moravec
along with short overviews of the different periods in Earth’s history —
http://www.prehistory.com/colorchr.htm
LECTURE ONE
8
Lecture 2:
Digging Up Dinos
The Suggested Reading for this lecture is John R. Horner’s

Digging Dinosaurs.
inosaurs first evolved in the Mesozoic Era about 230

million years ago and they did not become extinct until
sixty-five million years ago (and even then, they were
survived by the birds). So the non-avian dinosaurs
enjoyed a long tenure on Earth, about 165 million
years, far longer than humans or their immediate
ancestors have been present on the planet. That span
of time seems like a lot, ample time to accumulate many
dinosaur corpses. But it’s not that simple. The world is not lit-
tered with dead bodies of animals because they are scavenged, torn apart,
rotted, and totally decomposed, ultimately by bacteria. So it is now, so it was
in the days of dinosaurs.
Fossils are relatively rare. The chance of any animal becoming fossilized is
miniscule. The chances of hitting the fossil jackpot, becoming the one T. REX
that is perfectly preserved down to the last little bone, is likely less probable
than winning a huge lottery jackpot. But given lots of time and lots of
dinosaurs, there are winners. We have a fossil record to draw upon.
The fossil record is the dinosaur database. And excavating these long-dead
creatures and then reconstructing how they looked in life and how they lived
presents the ultimate in forensic science.
Like all creatures, dinosaurs died of illness and infection, predation, injury,
accidents, or, rarely, old age. When a dinosaur died it was likely to be con-
sumed by a predator or scavengers and they would scatter its bones. Rarely
are complete skeletons found. If the corpse was not immediately dismem-
bered it would bloat from intestinal bacterial gasses, maybe even rupture.
Many dinosaur remains are found with their necks arching well over their
backs, a posture called the “death pose.”
Hard parts such as teeth and bones tend to decompose slowly simply
because they are mostly mineral and thus not nutritious to decomposer
organisms. Teeth, particularly enamel, are the hardest part of a vertebrate
animal, because they comprise mostly minerals of phosphorus and calcium.
Soft parts are readily consumed and thus are rarely preserved.
Sometimes dinosaur skin, at least parts of it, are fossilized. In addition, such
things as dinosaur eggs and nests, tracks and trackways, and feces some-
times fossilize. All of these things are intensively studied.
An artifact must be at least ten thousand years old to be considered a fossil
and thus all dinosaur remains are fossils. In most cases the original bone has
been replaced by other minerals, the process called petrification. Dinosaur
9
fossils are found only in sedimentary rocks, such as sandstone, mudstone,
limestone, and shale. This is because they must be buried in some sort of
sediment for preservation to occur. Dinosaur fossils are aged by two meth-
ods, biostratigraphy and radiometric dating. Only the latter method gives
exact dates.
To find dinosaur fossils requires going to where sedimentary rocks of
Mesozoic age are exposed. Such areas include the huge Morrison Formation
of the American West, the Dinosaur Park Formation in Alberta, Canada, and
places as wide ranging as Mongolia, eastern China, Argentina, southeastern
Australia, and Ethiopia. Even Alaska and Antarctica have dinosaur remains.
Sometimes dinosaur bones are highly concentrated, such as at Howe Quarry
in Big Horn Basin, Wyoming, where thirty metric tons of bone were removed
in 1932, all destined for the American Museum of Natural History.
It requires skill to find dinosaur bones and skeletons. The untrained observer
easily overlooks a piece of femur or a tooth, or a portion of a rib that may be
just slightly exposed.
It is a major task to excavate dinosaur skeletons. Sometimes the rock is very
hard and the skeleton deeply buried. As bones are exposed they are treated
to harden them, as they are often brittle. They are jacketed in plaster and
burlap and carefully removed for transport to a museum. There the bones
may be stored or immediately studied, meticulously exposed from the rock in
which they are encased, and sometimes mounted for exhibition. Most skele-
tons on exhibit these days are lightweight casts, identical to the “real thing”
but easier to mount in lifelike postures.
LECTURE TWO
10

Questions
1. What is a fossil and what are some of the ways it can form?
2. How are dinosaur and other fossils aged?
Suggested Reading
Horner, John R. Digging Dinosaurs. New York: Workman Publishing, 1988.
Horner, John R. Dinosaurs Under the Big Sky. Missoula, MT: Mountain
Press, 2001.
Novacek, Michael. Dinosaurs of the Flaming Cliffs. New York: Doubleday, 1996.
Websites to Visit
The BBC Science and Nature website Age of Dinosaurs provides an exten-
sive look at dinosaurs — http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/prehistoric_life/dinosaurs
11
Lecture 3:
Dinosaurs Discovered
The Suggested Reading for this lecture is Christopher McGowan’s

The Dragon Seekers: The Discovery of Dinosaurs During the Prelude
to Darwin.
ossils of large extinct animals must have been found by

humans for as long as there have been humans. The
question, of course, was what these odd things were.
Perhaps they were giant humans from ages past or per-
haps mythological creatures such as griffins or cyclops.
The first actual description of a dinosaur bone was done by
Robert Plot in England in 1677. But he thought the lower end of
the thigh bone, which is all he had to go on, was that of a giant
human from biblical times. This analysis did not improve in accuracy when
some eighty-six years later the same exact specimen was rediscovered by
Richard Brookes, who (because only the two rounded condyles of the base of
the bone were preserved) took it to be a petrified scrotum from a giant human
male. Thus Brookes named it Scrotum humanum, a poor choice of name for
what was, in fact, the femur of a dinosaur, a MEGALOSAURUS. Fortunately, the
name was never adopted.
Comparative anatomy was the discovery of Baron Georges Cuvier of
France, whose productive life spanned the turn of the eighteenth into the
nineteenth century. He became so skilled at the study of vertebrate anatomy
that he could generally identify any animal merely by looking at a single bone
from it. Cuvier also provided scientific proof of the reality of extinction. He
argued that lineages of creatures suffered periodic catastrophes that annihi-
lated many of them, but that newly created forms were improved over those
that preceded them. This notion paralleled the concept of industrial and soci-
etal progress and so was referred to as progressionism.
Fossils became curiosities not only to scientists, but to the general public. In
England, Mary Anning of Dorset found and sold hundreds of fossils, including
wonderful specimens of ICHTHYOSAURS and PLESIOSAURS. She became highly
celebrated in the rhyme “She sells seashells by the seashore.” In the United
States, a Massachusetts farm boy named Pliny Moody discovered many fos-
silized tracks that appeared to be those of giant extinct birds, popularly called
“Noah’s raven.” It would be years before it was realized that the tracks were
those made by dinosaurs over two hundred million years ago.
In England, William Buckland, in 1818, was shown the partial jawbone and
teeth of what appeared to be a very large lizard. He named it MEGALOSAURUS,
LECTURE THREE
“large reptile.” Buckland did not know it at the time, but he had formally
named the first dinosaur. Buckland believed that this reptile, whatever it was,
was colossal. He estimated its length at about sixty to seventy feet, a signifi-
cant overestimate.
12
The second dinosaur to be described was discovered in 1825 by a physician
named Gideon Algernon Mantell. Originally based on fossil teeth and later on
some bones, Mantell believed the teeth of this extinct reptile bore a com-
pelling resemblance to those of an iguana lizard, only much larger. Thus he
named his fossil IGUANODON, meaning “iguana tooth.”
Other fossil reptiles were found and it fell to a talented young anatomist
named Richard Owen to formally analyze and describe the group. He did so
and, in 1841, he presented his findings.
Owen asserted that the large extinct reptiles were unique, deserving of a
group of their own. He called this group DINOSAURIA, the “fearfully great rep-
tiles.” Dinosaurs, as Owen defined them, were reptilian, large, upright in pos-
ture, and had a backbone such that more than two sacral vertebrae articulat-
ed with the hip.
Though Owen had no complete skeletons from which to work, he recon-
structed dinosaurs to be rhinoceros-like, four-legged, stocky, but with a reptil-
ian countenance. They had large thick tails that dragged behind them. Their
pillar-like legs ended in clawed feet. They were scaly, like lizards. Owen
reconstructed IGUANODON with a nose horn similar to that of a rhinoceros.
When Great Britain celebrated the Great Exhibition of 1851, dinosaurs were
featured in the form of full-scale models commissioned by Owen and sculpted
by Waterhouse Hawkins. These models were striking, indeed impressive, but
anatomically far from the mark. They can still be seen today in a park in
south London.
In 1858, Joseph Leidy found the first complete dinosaur skeleton in
Haddonfield, New Jersey. He named it HADROSAURUS. He saw that its hind
legs were considerably larger than its fore legs and thus thought it must
have been bipedal. He reconstructed it standing upright on its hind legs, its
long tail dragging behind, its forelegs dangling in the air. It resembled a huge
reptilian kangaroo.
The next complete dinosaur skeletons changed the image that Owen had
created of IGUANODON. In 1877, a huge deposit of IGUANODON skeletons was
found in a coal mine in Bernissart, Belgium. Many skeletons were complete
and thirty-nine were carefully removed for study and display in a Brussels
museum. Louis Dollo, an evolutionist and anatomist, reconstructed the ani-
mals just as Leidy did with HADROSAURUS, in an upright, kangaroo-like pos-
ture. To do so, Dollo had to inflict a severe bend in the tail. In life, truth be
told, the tail would require breaking to accommodate such a posture. But one
thing Dollo did get correct was that IGUANODON did not have a nose horn like a
rhinoceros. The spike belonged with its thumb, not on its nose.
In the twentieth century, the British paleontologist David B. Norman of the
the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences at the University of Cambridge in
England, has shown clearly that IGUANODON’s backbone was essentially hori-
zontal, its thick tail helping balance the weight of the front of the animal, the
center of gravity cantilevered over its hips. The creature was only partially
bi-pedal and could balance comfortably on all fours, its tail stiff and straight,
not dragging in the least.
13
IGUANODON, as a single Pliny Moody’s Tracks
example, helps show Amherst College (Amherst, Massachusetts) geologist
how accumulation of Edward Hitchcock (1793–1864) first saw the slab in
knowledge changes per- 1835 and recognized the footprints as those of an
ceptions, how dinosaurs ancient animal that had been fossilized in the rock.
According to Hitchcock, the slab was discovered by a
such as IGUANODON
young man named Pliny Moody (ca. 1791–1868), about
“evolved” in the minds of 1802, as he was plowing his father Ebenezer’s field in
humans from giant rhi- South Hadley. Moody, with typical New England practi-
noceros-like lizards to cality, put it to use as the family doorstep. He called the
huge reptilian kangaroos footprints those of “Noah’s raven,” apparently thinking
to our present vision of that only a bird out of the Bible could have made tracks
them as unique animals of such impressive size.
in no way like rhinos or Just a few months later, Hitchcock published his first
kangaroos. Owen had far scientific paper on the tracks in the prestigious American
less to work with than did Journal of Science. He called his new branch of science
Dollo. And David ornithichnology, meaning “the study of stony bird tracks.”
Later, he shortened the name to ichnology. Today,
Norman, in the century
ichnology refers to the study of tracks left by ancient
just past, had the benefit animals while alive, including footprints, tail-skin impres-
of vastly more informa- sions, bite marks, nests, and even fossilized feces.
tion. That is how Sources: Pick, Nancy. “King of Prints.” Amherst Magazine. Amherst
science works. College. Amherst, MA: Fall, 2005. Emily Gold Boutilier, Office of
Public Affairs, Amherst College, Amherst, MA; Joe Rodio, Director,
Town of South Hadley Public Library, and the South Hadley Town
Clerk’s Office, South Hadley, MA, http://www.southhadleyma.org.
LECTURE THREE
14

Questions
1. Who first coined the name “dinosaur” and why were dinosaurs recognized
as a group apart from other vertebrate animals?
2. Why does the history of Iguanodon represent a good example of how sci-
ence actually works?
Suggested Reading
McGowan, Christopher. The Dragon Seekers: The Discovery of Dinosaurs

During the Prelude to Darwin. London: Little, Brown, 2001.
Colbert, Edwin H. Dinosaurs: An Illustrated History. Maplewood, NJ:

Hammond Inc., 1983.
———. The Great Dinosaur Hunters and Their Discoveries. Reprint. New
York: Dover, 1984.
Lessem, Don. Dinosaurs Rediscovered. New York: Touchstone, 1992.
Websites to Visit
1. The Linda Hall Library of Science, Engineering, and Technology website

provides a short overview of Robert Plot’s part in the history of dinosaurs
with an article entitled “Plot’s Unrecognized Dinosaur Bone, 1676” —
http://www.lindahall.org/events_exhib/exhibit/exhibits/dino/plo1676.htm
2. The University of California Museum of Paleontology features a biography
of Mary Anning — http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/history/anning.html
3. The Amherst Magazine website at Amherst College provides an excellent
story entitled “King of Prints” by Nancy Pick from its fall 2005 issue. Pliny
Moody’s discovery of dinosaur tracks on his father’s farm is detailed in the
article about Amherst College’s renowned geologist, Edward Hitchcock —
http://www.amherst.edu/magazine/issues/05fall/king_prints
4. Dinohunters.com provides a timeline of Gideon Algernon Mantell’s work
and several pages pertinent to IGUANODON and other dinosaurs —
http://www.dinohunters.com/Mantell/Dates.htm
5. Richard Owen’s biography is featured at the University of California
Museum of Paleontology website —
http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/history/owen.html
6. The Academy of Natural Science in Philadelphia website provides the story
of Joseph Leidy and his work involving dinosaurs —
http://www.ansp.org/museum/leidy/index.php
15
Lecture 4:
The Bone Wars
The Suggested Reading for this lecture is David Rains Wallace’s The
Bonehunters’ Revenge.
ne way to become immortal, at least in a manner of speak-

ing, is to have a scientific specimen named after you. Two
small and rather undistinguished dinosaurs, one named
OTHNIELLA, the other named DRINKER, celebrate the lives
of two of the most ambitious of the dinosaur scientists,
Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope.
Both Marsh and Cope lived during the latter half of the
nineteenth century and each contributed much to the grow-
ing knowledge of dinosaurs. But they became rivals, bitter rivals,
and engaged in what has become known as “The Bone Wars.” The wars,
such as they were, were fought in the vast fossil fields of western North
America at a time when the West was still a difficult and dangerous place. The
spoils were measured in dinosaur and other vertebrate fossils and both Marsh
and Cope competed to see who could unearth the most and name the most
fossil vertebrates.
O.C. Marsh was director of the natural history museum at Yale University
(New Haven, CT), named the Peabody Museum in honor of Marsh’s uncle,
George Peabody, a highly successful industrialist who, at his nephew’s
request, supplied funding to build the museum.
E.D. Cope was born of wealthy Quaker parents in Philadelphia and he
was, for most of his life, associated with the Philadelphia Academy of
Natural Sciences.
While their common interest in fossil vertebrates made them initially friends,
the rivalry between Marsh and Cope began not long after they met. Both were
men of means and both would pay handsomely for fossils such that each soon
tried to get the better of the other. One reason for Cope’s apparent hatred for
Marsh was that Marsh embarrassed Cope by pointing out that Cope had
placed the skull on the wrong end of a giant fossil marine reptile called a PLE-
SIOSAUR. Cope thought the long neck was the animal’s tail! Cope’s disgust for
Marsh intensified when Marsh paid for dinosaur bones also offered to Cope,
and Cope was forced to send the bones to Marsh, even as he was attempting
to describe them for publication.
From about 1866 through the early 1890s Marsh and Cope paid teams of
men to excavate dinosaur bones from deposits scattered around the West.
LECTURE FOUR
Cope spent considerably more time afield then Marsh. Conditions were diffi-
cult. Travel was rigorous and risky, winters were highly challenging (though
work continued), and indigenous people posed some safety risk. Nonethe-
less, many tons of dinosaur bones from both the Jurassic and Cretaceous
periods were dug or even blasted from rock, prepared and then loaded on to
16
mule and ox-drawn wagons, transported to railheads, and moved east, some
to New Haven, some to Philadelphia.
No direct hostilities ever occurred between either the two principals or their
hired workers, though Cope’s team and Marsh’s team did encounter one
another on occasion and may not have liked being in each other’s company.
They were secretive, and they sometimes destroyed bones rather than have
them taken by the other team. The real measure of the Bone Wars was in
publication. Both Cope and Marsh sought legacy through describing and
naming fossil vertebrates, not just dinosaurs but mammals (abundant after
the dinosaur extinction) as well.
The rush to name things resulted in some species inadvertently being named
several times, depending upon where the bones were found and how com-
plete the skeleton was. For example, Marsh initially named an animal he
called APATOSAURUS and later, when he described a different and more com-
plete skeleton, he named that animal BRONTOSAURUS. But both fossil bone sets
were from different individuals of the same kind of animal and thus the name
APATOSAURUS, which came first, is the recognized scientific name of one of the
most iconic of the dinosaurs, the long-necked sauropod “thunder lizard” of
the Jurassic.
Thanks to the untiring zeal of O.C. Marsh and E.D. Cope, we have come to
know dinosaurs such as ALLOSAURUS, APATOSAURUS, CERATOSAURUS,
CAMARASAURUS, DIPLODOCUS, STEGOSAURUS, and TRICERATOPS. Though the bitter
rivalry was unfortunate perhaps, the results were that museums began to
exhibit amazing dinosaur skeletons and the public began to develop a keen
interest if not yet a full understanding of these remarkable extinct animals.
17

Questions
1. How did Cope and Marsh become such bitter rivals?

2. How did this rivalry contribute to growing knowledge about dinosaurs?
Suggested Reading
Wallace, David Rains. The Bonehunters’ Revenge. Boston: Houghton

Mifflin, 1999.
Lanham, Url. The Bone Hunters. New York: Columbia University Press, 1973.
Ostrom, John H., and John S. McIntosh. Marsh’s Dinosaurs. New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1966.
Websites to Visit
“The Bone Wars: Othniel Charles Marsh, Edward Drinker Cope, and the Yale
Expedition of 1870” from Wyoming Tales and Trails website —
http://www.wyomingtalesandtrails.com/bonewars2.html
LECTURE FOUR
18
Lecture 5:
The Museum That Dinosaurs Built
The Suggested Reading for this lecture is Mark A. Norell, Eugene S.

Gaffney, and Lowell Dingus’s Discovering Dinosaurs in the American
Museum of Natural History.
he American Museum of Natural History, located at

Central Park West in Manhattan, opened to the public in
1877. Its first president, Morris K. Jesup, sought to
include dinosaurs among the growing exhibits of the
museum. He hired a young aristocratic man just out of
Princeton University, his Ph.D. in vertebrate paleontology.
This man, Henry Fairfield Osborn, would eventually succeed
Jesup as museum president, and would oversee the acquisi-
tion of a huge collection of vertebrate fossils, including the
world’s most outstanding collection of dinosaurs.
Osborn assembled a talented team of field paleontologists as well as excel-
lent fossil preparators. By the beginning of the twentieth century the museum
was assembling and exhibiting dozens of noteworthy skeletons and other fos-
sil material. Osborn secured funding not only for expeditions, but also to pur-
chase whole collections, such as that of E.D. Cope. He also used his person-
al riches to fund the growth of the collection.
Osborn was a scholar who wrote about evolutionary biology and who
believed strongly in a concept called orthogenesis. This posits that evolution-
ary directions are in some way predetermined and thus animal lineages show
clear directional trends. Many of Osborn’s fossil exhibits were designed by
him to reflect this now largely discredited concept. Osborn also held strong
beliefs regarding human evolution, convinced that Homo sapiens emerged
first in Asia. A major reason why Osborn strongly supported the museum’s
ambitious Central Asiatic Expeditions of the 1920s was an attempt to prove
his theory about human origins. Osborn also recognized that dinosaurs were
a wonderful drawing card for the general public and thus he enthusiastically
supported collecting as many dinosaurs as he could get.
Barnum Brown was hired by Osborn to be his chief fossil hunter and he suc-
ceeded beyond all expectations. Brown had a sixty-six-year career at the
museum and traveled to many remote locations to find and extract dinosaur
skeletons. Much of the museum’s remarkable collection is attributable to
Brown’s efforts.
One of Brown’s most famous discoveries was from a place in Montana called
Hell Creek. There he found several partial skeletons and an almost complete
skeleton of a huge animal that Osborn initially named Dynamosaurus imperio-
sus. Osborn’s more detailed analysis led him to change the animal’s name to
TYRANNOSAURUS REX. The animal was mounted as bipedal with its back arching
up, its head high above the ground, its tail dragging behind it, an image of
T. REX that would persist for most of the twentieth century.
19
Barnum Brown also unearthed numerous dinosaurs from the Red Deer River
in southern Alberta, Canada. He invented the technique of floating down the
river aboard a large raft of his own design fully equipped for fossil hunting,
with a tent and cooking stove, searching for dinosaur outcrops along the
steep cliffs that lined the river.
Brown was not the only skilled fossil hunter employed by Osborn. Walter
Granger was also a distinguished dinosaur finder. Some of his most notable
work was ultimately due to the efforts of a man who was more of a bold
explorer than a careful and deliberate paleontologist. This man was Roy
Chapman Andrews, the alleged inspiration for the film character “Indiana
Jones.”
Andrews worked his way up at the museum and was the principal organizer
of a series of five expeditions to Outer Mongolia. The first of these began in
the summer of 1922. Andrews literally drove across vast uncharted miles of
desert in automobiles supplied by the Dodge Motor Company. He arranged
for long camel caravans to meet his team at various locations to bring sup-
plies, including gasoline for the vehicles.
Andrews’s expeditions were successful in finding numerous fossil mammals
and lots of dinosaurs. At a place they nicknamed “The Flaming Cliffs,” they
found eggs of dinosaurs, the first real confirmation that dinosaurs laid eggs.
They also excavated numerous skeletons of a new kind of dinosaur called
PROTOCERATOPS. The expeditions excited the public about the museum and
about dinosaurs and helped immensely to build the museum’s collection and
reputation. Andrews eventually became the president of the American
Museum of Natural History. He is also known for his books, written both for
adults and children, giving lively accounts of his adventures.
Another essential person in the American Museum’s dinosaur program was
the artist Charles R. Knight. He emerged as the preeminent illustrator of the
prehistoric world. His murals and other paintings are exhibited at the Chicago
Field Museum and Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History as well as
the American Museum of Natural History. His career began and much of his
work was done at and for the American Museum in New York, where he
worked closely with Henry Fairfield Osborn. Knight’s evocative illustrations
were widely reproduced for most of the century in any and all dinosaur books
or articles about dinosaurs. In some ways, Knight basically defined the various
dinosaurs and he also seems to have anticipated the change in perception of
dinosaurs that occurred in the latter part of the twentieth century, as dinosaurs
came to be seen as more dynamic and bird-like in their behavior.
Edwin H. Colbert continued the American Museum’s activity in dinosaur
excavation in the mid-twentieth century working mostly in New Mexico at a
place called Ghost Ranch. He unearthed numerous vertebrate skeletons from
the Triassic period, including many small predatory dinosaurs of the genus
COELOPHYSIS. One year before his retirement from the museum at the age of
LECTURE FIVE
sixty-five, he helped unearth a mammal-like reptile called LYSTROSAURUS from

Antarctica, providing strong support that Antarctica had once been fused with
Africa, where LYSTROSAURUS was also uncovered.
20
The museum continues as a leading repository of dinosaur skeletons and
other fossil material. From 1991 to 1996 it completely reorganized its exhibits
on vertebrate evolution and remounted both its T. REX and APATOSAURUS
skeletons to positions thought now to be most accurate. The museum contin-
ues to explore Asia and other places, adding to its collections and to our
knowledge of the prehistoric world.
21

Questions
1. Why did Henry Fairfield Osborn give so much attention and effort toward
building the dinosaur collection at the American Museum of Natural History?
2. What obstacles did Roy Chapman Andrews have to overcome in planning
and executing the five Central Asiatic Expeditions in the 1920s?
Suggested Reading
Norell, Mark A., Eugene S. Gaffney, and Lowell Dingus. Discovering

Dinosaurs in the American Museum of Natural History. New York: Alfred
A. Knopf, 1995.
Bird, Roland T. Bones for Barnum Brown. Fort Worth, TX: Texas Christian
University Press, 1985.
Czerkas, Sylvia Massey, and Donald F. Glut. Dinosaurs, Mammoths, and
Cavemen: The Art of Charles R. Knight. New York: E.P. Dutton, Inc., 1982.
Gallenkamp, Charles. Dragon Hunter: Roy Chapman Andrews and the
Central Asiatic Expeditions. New York: Viking, 2001.
Rainger, Ronald. An Agenda for Antiquity: Henry Fairfield Osborn and
Vertebrate Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History,
1890–1935. Tuscalosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1991.
Sternberg, Charles Hazelius. Hunting Dinosaurs in the Bad Lands of the Red
Deer River, Alberta, Canada. Edmonton: NeWest Press, 1985.
Wallace, Joseph. The American Museum of Natural History’s Book of
Dinosaurs and Other Ancient Creatures. New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1994.
Websites to Visit
1. The American Museum of Natural History — http://www.amnh.org

2. Carnegie Museum of Natural History — http://www.clpgh.org/cmnh
3. The Field Museum of Natural History website features “The World of
LECTURE FIVE
Charles R. Knight” — http://www.charlesrknight.com/fmnh.htm

4. Smithsonian Institution National Museum: Natural History —
http://nmnh.si.edu/departments/paleo.html
22
Lecture 6:
Dinosaurs Enter Pop Culture
The Suggested Reading for this lecture is Jose Luis Sanz’s Starring T.
Rex!: Dinosaur Mythology and Popular Culture.
inosaurs have become very much a part of pop culture.

For many years the comic strip Ally Oop featured
dinosaurs and humans sharing the same prehistoric
world. Later came The Flintstones and later still came
the child-friendly purple dinosaur Barney. Anyone famil-
iar with the unique humor of Gary Larson’s cartoons
knows how much dinosaurs are part of our psyche. How
did they get there?
The first real burst of “Dinomania” was likely the Great
Exhibition in Great Britain at the height of the Victorian Era, when Richard
Owen supervised Waterhouse Hawkins in modeling full-sized replicas of what
dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures were thought to have looked like.
That drew a crowd. But it wasn’t until the twentieth century that dinosaurs
really took hold of the public imagination in the United States. That happened
with a cartoon.
One of the first animated cartoons ever produced was Gertie the Dinosaur,
released in 1914. Gertie was a rambunctious BRONTOSAUR that was, nonethe-
less, charming and clever. In one sequence Gertie tosses a woolly mammoth
into a pond, only to have the mammoth retaliate by squirting Gertie.
Soon after, in 1919, came a short film, The Ghost of Slumber Mountain. The
film was a fantasy, where looking through a certain magical telescope would
reveal the prehistoric world. Featured were moving dinosaurs modeled after
the images of dinosaurs by Charles R. Knight, created and animated by
someone who would become a legend in the film industry, Willis O’Brien.
Public reaction was enthusiastic. Now, thanks to films, people could begin to
imagine dinosaurs as real animals.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, famous for his detective Sherlock Holmes, also con-
tributed mightily to connecting dinosaurs with the general public. In 1912 his
science fiction novel The Lost World was published. It featured a land of
dinosaurs and cave people atop a table mountain in remote northeastern
South America. The book was good but the American public would like the
movie even better.
The Lost World was produced as a feature film in 1925 for the then stagger-
ing cost of a million dollars. It starred Wallace Beery as Professor George
Challenger, but the real stars, just as with Jurassic Park sixty-eight years
later, were the dinosaurs. This silent black-and-white film was a huge box
office success. Even by today’s standards, the animation remains amazing.
There are vivid scenes filled with animated dinosaurs so lifelike that some
moviegoers actually wondered if they really were actual dinosaurs.
23
Willis O’Brien, nicknamed “Obie,” continued to perfect his technique of stop-
motion photography. This requires that a metal armature of an animal be built
such that it can be moved in positions that the actual animal might assume.
Then the armature is molded lifelike with clay and finished with rubbery skin
and realistic features. It is then moved ever so slightly as the film is shot
frame by tedious frame. But, when done like Obie did it, it is amazingly effec-
tive and realistic.
The Lost World established the formula for many a film to come. A prehistoric
creature is found and brought back to a big city. It escapes, reeks havoc, and
is finally killed or goes away. In The Lost World, after collapsing the London
Bridge, the previously captive BRONTOSAURUS swims down the Thames and out
of the film. The general public found movie dinosaurs to indeed be “fearfully
great lizards,” but not insurmountable adversaries. They were kind of fun.
Willis O’Brien followed his success in The Lost World by animating King
Kong, released in 1933. This film was a blockbuster and featured several
dinosaurs in addition to the giant ape. The most outstanding sequence involv-
ing a dinosaur was the titanic battle between a T. REX and Kong. That scene
remains a classic in American film.
Thanks to the growth of museums and the use of dinosaurs in successful
films, the American pubic had come to know dinosaurs and be interested
in them.
The Sinclair Oil Company promoted dinosaurs when it adopted a
BRONTOSAURUS as its mascot and funded the construction of life-sized
dinosaurs for the Chicago World’s Fair in 1933–1934. The company contin-
ued to feature dinosaurs in stamps, plastic models, and other collectables
and again sponsored the construction of full-sized dinosaur models for the
New York World’s Fair in 1964–1965.
Many films of the 1950s featured dinosaurs, but two of the most notable are
The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953) and The Animal World (1956). Both
were animated using stop-motion by a student of Willis O’Brien’s named Ray
Harryhausen. Harryhausen went on to a highly distinguished career as a stop
motion film animator. The Beast, adopted from a Ray Bradbury short story,
was a classic 1950s apocalyptic film of the still-young atomic age where, yet
again, a prehistoric animal runs rampant in a big city and this time must be
cleverly killed by the very military folk who released it in the first place. The
Animal World featured only ten minutes of dinosaur scenes, but they were
meant to illustrate the animals in their Mesozoic habitats interacting among
themselves. The dinosaurs were lumbering, tail dragging, and reptilian, but
they did reflect how science envisioned them at the time.
The 1950s was a time when baby-boomer children embraced dinosaurs. Toy
dinosaurs were sold by various companies, the aforementioned films were
box office hits, and even comic book series such as Turok Son of Stone fea-
tured many kinds of dinosaurs.
LECTURE SIX
One boost to dinosaur popularity in the 1950s was an incredible cover story
by Life Magazine titled “Two Billion Years of Evolution.” On the cover of its
September 7, 1953, issue was a BRONTOSAURUS and STEGOSAURUS, part of the
Peabody Museum mural by Rudolf Zallinger. The fold-out mural of dinosaurs
24
depicting “The Age of Reptiles” that accompanied the story did much to stim-
ulate interest in dinosaurs.
But the political and social turmoil of the 1960s was such that dinosaurs
were rather eclipsed. The space race may have replaced the prehistoric
world in the public mind. That began to change quickly in 1975 when a young
paleontologist named Robert Bakker published an article in Scientific
American magazine with the title “Dinosaur Renaissance.” The idea that
dinosaurs may have been active and perhaps warm-blooded like birds and
mammals caught on with the public. Interest in dinosaurs grew again as pop-
ular articles in newspapers and magazines reported the new thinking about
dinosaurs and the debates it inspired.
The combination of swift, smart, dangerous dinosaurs and genetic engineer-
ing came together in 1990 with the bestselling Jurassic Park by Michael
Crichton. This was, of course, made into one of the most successful films in
history in 1993, directed by Steven Spielberg. This film is most important for
its animation breakthrough, the use of computer imagery to animate
dinosaurs. No film up to then ever depicted dinosaurs as so lifelike.
Use of computer technology has flourished since. The highly acclaimed
British series Walking with Dinosaurs, released in 1999, has spawned many
other similar efforts.
Dinosaurs have had a renaissance, not just in how science perceives them
but in how the general public embraces them. Museums have flourished and
increased their dinosaur exhibits, theme parks feature dinosaurs, traveling
exhibits of semi-animated dinosaurs remain popular, and many lines of toys,
replicas, and models are available to the dinosaur enthusiast. There is even a
dinosaur magazine featuring both the science and hobbyist aspects of
dinosaurs, Prehistoric Times.
25

Questions
1. When and how did dinosaurs first enter pop culture in Great Britain and
later in the United States?
2. How have dinosaurs in motion pictures contributed to the public perception
of dinosaurs and how does that compare with how scientists viewed them?
Suggested Reading
Sanz, Jose Luis. Starring T. Rex!: Dinosaur Mythology and Popular Culture.
Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2002.

Berry, Mark F. The Dinosaur Filmography. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and
Company, 2002.
Cain, Dana, and Mike Fredericks. Dinosaur Collectables. Norfolk, VA: Antique
Trader Books, 1999.
Debus, Allen A., and Diane E. Debus. Paleoimagery: The Evolution of
Dinosaurs in Art. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2002.
Glut, Donald F. The Dinosaur Scrapbook. Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1980.
Webber, Roy P. The Dinosaur Films of Ray Harryhausen. Jefferson, NC:
McFarland and Company, 2004.
Magazine of Interest
Prehistoric Times. Published quarterly. 145 Bayline Circle, Folsom, CA 95630

(www.prehistorictimes.com).
Websites to Visit
The Dinosauricon is a website devoted to dinosaur information and illustration

— http://dino.lm.com/pages
LECTURE SIX
26
Lecture 7:
Dinosaur Origins
The Suggested Reading for this lecture is Stephen Jay Gould’s The
Book of Life.
inosaurs flourished (excluding birds, which still flourish)

for approximately 165 million years. They lived during a
time geologists call the Mesozoic Era, the “Age of
Middle Life.” It is essential in tracing the evolutionary
origin of dinosaurs to understand something about the
age of the Earth and geologic time scales.
The Solar System—the Sun, Earth, planets, and other
bodies such as comets and asteroids—is considered to be
4.6 billion years old. This age is based on careful radiometric
dating from a variety of sources, including moon rocks. The universe itself is
estimated to have begun 13.8 billion years ago, so Earth and the rest of the
Solar System are only about one-third the age of the universe.
Earth formed as a “byproduct,” as did other planets when the Sun formed by
gravitational contraction within a large nebula. Our planet was initially molten
and lifeless. But trace fossils suggest that life evolved by 3.8 billion years
ago. From that point until about 2.5 billion years ago, all life was microbial,
various forms of bacteria called prokaryotes. Complex cells, called eukary-
otes, evolved about 2.5 billion years ago and eukaryotic multicellular life is
likely less than a billion years old. It was not until the start of the Paleozoic
Era, 543 million years ago, that multicellular life, plants and animals, became
abundantly represented in the fossil record. This surge in life-forms and com-
plexity may have had much to do with increasing oxygen levels (produced by
plants during photosynthesis).
If the history of Earth is compressed into but a single year, with the forma-
tion of the planet on January 1, the first complex animal communities would
not appear until about November 20. Dinosaurs would dominate the planet
from December 21–27. Primitive humans would not appear until 9:07 PM on
December 31 and Homo sapiens, modern humans, would not appear until fif-
teen minutes before midnight.
How did the dinosaurs evolve? Who were their ancestors?
Dinosaurs, like humans, are vertebrate animals, animals with backbones. All
vertebrates are part of a phylum called Chordata, meaning animals with a
flexible notochord running the length of their back. In vertebrates, bony verte-
brae largely replace the notochord during fetal development. Our interverte-
bral disks are the remains of our original notochord. Vertebrates share other
chordate characters (such as a hollow nerve cord atop the vertebral column)
as well as possessing unique characters placing them in the subphylum
Vertebrata, such as forming a skeleton of bone.
27
Vertebrates were present in the earliest part of the Paleozoic Era, the
Cambrian period, thus their history goes back at least 500 million years.
Earliest vertebrates were small marine animals, like tiny tadpoles. Vertebrates
grew larger and diversified throughout the Paleozoic Era, which lasted from
543 to 248 million years ago. The Devonian period, 410 to 360 million years
ago, is often termed the “Age of Fishes” because of the great diversity of fish
types then present. The most significant event of the Paleozoic Era was
when one group of fishes became tetrapods (four-footed) by developing mus-
cular limbs with digits. Some of these earliest tetrapods adapted to breathe
oxygen from the atmosphere and become mobile on land. This group
became the amphibians, an event that occurred in the late Devonian Period,
about 380 million years ago.
Reptiles differ from amphibians in many respects, but in the early stages of
reptile evolution the differences are not obvious. The most critical difference
is that reptiles lay amniotic or cleidoic eggs (like a chicken egg) that have a
hard protective shell and contain nourishing membranes within the egg to
feed and protect the developing embryo. Reptiles, mammals, and birds are
modern Amniotes. Early reptiles also have more vaulted, less flattened skulls
than amphibians. Reptiles evolved in the Carboniferous period, about 320
million years ago.
Early reptiles, called Anapsids, had a solidly roofed skull. But by the late
Carboniferous and into the Permian period that followed, reptiles diversified
and flourished. One group, named the Synapsids, developed a skull with an
opening low on the skull behind the eye. This opening permitted more effec-
tive muscle attachment to operate the jaws. After millions of years, in the
Triassic period at around the same time as dinosaurs first appeared, true
mammals evolved from advanced synapsids.
Another primitive reptilian group developed a single opening high on its
skull, behind the eye. This group, the Euryapsids, gave rise to two diverse
groups of marine reptiles, the plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs.
Still another reptile lineage had not one but two openings behind the eye on
the skull. This group, called the Diapsids, diversified into many lineages.
One lineage, called the Lepidosaurs, became the group giving rise to lizards
and snakes.
But the most diverse group of diapsid reptiles was one called the
Archosaurs. Archosaurs shared certain skull characters in common, including
an opening in front of the eye as well as two behind the eye, plus an opening
in the lower jaw. They were also adapted for relatively upright posture, with
longer hind limbs so they were able to move effectively, some even able to
gallop, some bipedal. Archosaurs gave rise to crocodilians (alligators and
crocodiles), flying reptiles called pterosaurs, and—to dinosaurs.
Dinosaurs as a group are most closely related to pterosaurs, and both
LECTURE SEVEN
dinosaurs and pterosaurs are in a general group called Ornithodires. This

name refers to the unique ankle joint, which is hinge-like, allowing only for-
ward and backward motion that supports active locomotion.
There were three major extinction events in the Paleozoic Era. Major extinc-
tions occurred in the Ordovician and Devonian periods. The largest major
28
extinction of all time ended the Paleozoic Era some 248 million years ago. It
is estimated that up to 90 percent of species perished in the course of this
major extinction. But those that survived provided the basis for a significant
diversification that characterized the Triassic period, the first of three periods
of the Mesozoic Era. The Triassic ranged from 248 to 206 million years ago.
Approximately 228 million years ago, dinosaurs appear in the fossil record.
Dinosaurs all share a set of defining characteristics. These are (1) upright
posture with a thigh bone whose head is angled to fit into an opening
(acetabulum) in the pelvis (hip); (2) a perforated (that is, a “hole”) acetabulum
in the pelvis; (3) at least three sacral vertebrae fused with the ilium bone of
the hip. Originally dinosaurs were bipedal and many dinosaurs remained so,
but some dinosaur lineages became secondarily quadripedal, moving on all
four appendages. Even these forms typically retained shorter anterior
appendages (“arms”) than posterior appendages (“legs”).
29

Questions
1. When did dinosaurs first evolve and from what group of animals?
2. What anatomical characteristics actually identify an animal as being
a dinosaur?
Suggested Reading
Gould, Stephen Jay, ed. The Book of Life. New York: W.W. Norton, 2001.
Fortey, Richard. Life: A Natural History of the First Four Billion Years of Life
on Earth. New York: Vintage Books, 1997.
Norman, David. Prehistoric Life and the Rise of the Vertebrates. New York:
Macmillan, 1994.
Reader, John. The Rise of Life: The First 3.5 Billion Years. New York: Alfred
A. Knopf, 1986.
Journal of Interest
The Journal of Dinosaur Paleontology —

http://www.dinosauria.com/jdp/jdp.htm
LECTURE SEVEN
30
Lecture 8:
In the Days of Dinosaurs
The Suggested Reading for this lecture is Edwin H. Colbert’s The Age
of Reptiles.
inosaurs were the dominant terrestrial animals for most of

the Mesozoic Era, which began 248 million years ago
and ended 65 million years ago. Based on biostratigra-
phy, the study of the fossils in sedimentary rocks, pale-
ontologists divide the Mesozoic into three periods.
These are the Triassic (248 to 206 million years ago),
the Jurassic (206 to 144 million years ago), and the
Cretaceous (144 to 65 million years ago). The oldest
dinosaur bones are dated at 228 million years ago (upper
Triassic), so dinosaurs were present from then until only the avian dinosaurs
(birds) remained, 65 million years ago, a time span of 163 million years. But
dinosaurs did not diversify and become dominant until early in the Jurassic
period. Thus it is the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods that together comprise
the real “Age of Dinosaurs.”
At the dawn of the Mesozoic Era, Earth’s various ecosystems had collectively
suffered the most catastrophic mass extinction that has ever occurred. Over
90 percent of all animal species failed to survive from the Permian into the
Triassic. The cause of the great extinction remains largely a mystery, but
extraordinary volcanic action is believed to be involved, causing atmospheric
changes that could have triggered the extinction. As recovery slowly began,
opportunities for evolutionary and ecological divergence were great and soon
many groups of animals were diversifying.
Looking at a map of the world in the Triassic period would pose challenges in
locating, say, Florida, Italy, India, Scotland. All of today’s continents were
fused into a giant single continent named Pangea. The world’s oceans were
then but one ocean, the Sea of Panthalassa. But midway into the Triassic,
Pangea began to break apart and slowly, at rates of between one and two
centimeters annually, continental drift began as tectonic plates separated. By
the end of the Cretaceous period, a world map would bear a strong resem-
blance to today’s continental distribution.
The Triassic period was a time of seasonal changes within an overall hot
and arid environment. Desert conditions prevailed in many areas. Tempera-
tures were warm but variable and shortage of water may have limited distrib-
ution of animals. The most prevalent plants were forests of tall coniferous
trees similar to today’s pines and cypresses. There were no flowering plants
as they would not evolve until the Cretaceous period. In addition to conifers,
many cycads, with stiff palm-like leaves, were present as well as large seed
ferns and giant horsetails. Invertebrates such as insects, spiders, scorpions,
and earthworms were abundant and were a food base for some vertebrates.
31
Most large amphibians failed to survive the Permian extinction, but some
did. Among them a group called the metoposaurs, which could reach lengths
of six feet. Other smaller amphibians eventually evolved into today’s frogs,
toads, and salamanders.
Among the unique reptile groups evolving in the Triassic were ichthyosaurs
and plesiosaurs. Ichthyosaurs first appeared in the early Triassic. Ichthyosaurs
were fish-like in shape but were air-breathing euryapsid reptiles, evolved from
land-dwelling ancestors, but adapted to a totally aquatic ecology. One Triassic
ichthyosaur, SHONISAURUS, was huge, weighing up to forty tons, perhaps the
largest animal of the Triassic. By the late Triassic, sea serpent-like plesiosaurs
evolved, also from terrestrial ancestors. Like ichthyosaurs, they were euryap-
sid reptiles, but their bodies resembled sea turtles, compact with huge flipper
fins. Some had long necks and small skulls, and some had short necks and
elongated skulls. All appear to have been predators likely feeding on fish and
squid. Both icthyosaurs and plesiosaurs would continue to diversify and both
groups persisted until the Cretaceous extinction event.
Pterosaurs first appear around the time of dinosaur emergence, about 228
million years ago in the late Triassic. They were flying reptiles with wings
supported by a forearm and hand with an elongate fourth finger. Wings were
made of skin membrane reinforced by protein fibers. Many if not all had a
hair-like covering and were likely warm-blooded. Many forms of pterosaurs
evolved and some that lived late in the Mesozoic had wingspans of up to
forty feet or more. All pterosaurs perished at the end of the Cretaceous.
Perhaps the most abundant vertebrate animal of the early Triassic was
LYSTROSAURUS, a dicynodont (“double dog-tooth”) mammal-like synapsid.
These sheep-sized, stocky, four-legged grazers abounded in many places.
Other synapsids were significant predators, such as a wolf-like group called
the gorgonopsids. Gradually a group of synapsids called cynodonts (“dog-
tooth”) evolved to be increasingly mammalian until true mammals emerged
about 228 million years ago, approximately when dinosaurs first appeared.
Diapsid reptiles, especially the Archosaurs, were highly diverse in the
Triassic. One group, the rauisuchians, were the largest of the land predators,
resembling a cross between a predaceous dinosaur and crocodile.
POSTOSUCHUS was a rauisuchian that reached a length of twenty feet. True
crocodilians (Eusuchia) also evolved in the Triassic as did phytosaurs, a dif-
ferent group of archosaurs that closely resembled true crocodilians. One
group of small agile reptiles, typified by an animal called EUPARKERIA, was
partly bipedal, sometimes running on hind legs and using the tail as a coun-
terweight and balancing organ. These animals, collectively called thecodonts
(“tooth in socket”), resembled dinosaurs and one group of them likely evolved
into the first dinosaurs.
The earliest true dinosaurs were EORAPTOR and HERRERASAURUS, both
unearthed in Argentina and estimated at 228 million years old. These were
LECTURE EIGHT
small predatory dinosaurs. Later, in New Mexico, there were large numbers of
a small (forty pound) predatory dinosaur called COELOPHYSIS. By the late
Triassic, at least two fairly large dinosaurs, PLATEOSAURUS (one-and-a-half
tons) and RIOJASAURUS (three tons), had evolved. Both were plant eaters dis-
tantly related to the large long-necked Brontosaur types that would come later.
32
The Jurassic saw a great diversification of dinosaurs. They became the pre-
dominant land vertebrates. Mammals remained small and inconspicuous.
The Jurassic world was less arid and more tropical than the Triassic. Sea
levels slowly rose. The central part of North America was inundated with the
great Sundance Sea. Rainfall increased, making the climate even more trop-
ical. Overall, the climate was warm, with no polar ice caps. Dominant trees
were gymnosperms, conifers such as cedars, pines, cypresses, and arau-
carias (monkey-puzzle trees). Ginkgos, many fern species, and cycads were
abundant. The Jurassic landscape would look familiar but for the lack of
flowering plants.
Huge herbivorous dinosaurs, the giant sauropods such as DIPLODOCUS and
APATOSAURUS, herded across the Jurassic landscape. Other plant eaters such
as well-armored stegosaurs and ankylosaurs evolved, as did various forms of
early ornithopod dinosaurs such as CAMPTOSAURUS. The dramatic increase in
large herbivorous dinosaurs was likely related to the abundance of vegetation
present during a time of equitable weather and tropical conditions. Small
predatory dinosaurs such as COMPSOGNATHUS were present and large
theropods such as ALLOSAURUS likely stalked the herds of sauropods.
Feathered dinosaurs evolved. ARCHAEOPTERYX, from the late Jurassic 150 mil-
lion years ago, is often called the urvogel, the first bird.
The Cretaceous period was also equitable and warm, with no polar ice caps.
Mild conditions prevailed even as far north as the latitude of northern Alaska.
The central part of North America was extensively inundated with ocean, the
Niobrara Sea. The major botanical event of the time was the evolution of
flowering plants, the angiosperms, including the earliest of the grasses. By
the late Cretaceous, flowering plants were becoming dominant components
of most terrestrial ecosystems.
Immense predators inhabited Cretaceous seas. In addition to ichthyosaurs
and plesiosaurs of many kinds there were mosasaurs, giant sea-going moni-
tor lizards. There were giant sharks in the sea and giant crocodiles along
shore, such as DEINOSUCHUS (thirty-five feet) and SARCOSUCHUS (forty feet),
both of which likely preyed on dinosaurs.
Dinosaurs diversified, especially the ornithopods that evolved into many
forms of plant-eating duck-billed dinosaurs. There were also ceratopsians,
the horned dinosaurs such as TRICERATOPS. An odd group called the bone-
headed dinosaurs or pachycephalosaurs evolved. Anklylosaurs diversified
too and long-necked sauropods, while less abundant than in the Jurassic,
continued. Many large predators evolved, including giants such as T. REX,
GIGANOTOSAURUS, and CARCHARODONTOSAURUS. Small predators included
VELOCIRAPTOR and DEINONYCHUS. Birds diversified as well as other forms of
feathered dinosaurs. As continents separated they each had its array
of dinosaurs.
The Cretaceous ended with a mass extinction that included all of the non-
avian dinosaurs as well as the ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, mosasaurs, and
pterosaurs. The only dinosaurs to escape the extinction were birds.
33

Questions
1. Name and describe the three periods of the Mesozoic Era.

2. What major groups of vertebrate animals, in addition to dinosaurs, were
present in the Mesozoic Era?
Suggested Reading
Colbert, Edwin H. The Age of Reptiles. Reprint. Mineola, NY: Dover, 1997.
Benton, Michael J. Vertebrate Paleontology. 3rd ed. Malden, U.K.:

Blackwell, 2005.
Burnie, David. The Kingfisher Illustrated Dinosaur Encyclopedia. New York:
Kingfisher, 2001.
Cloudsley-Thompson, J.L. Ecology and Behavior of Mesozoic Reptiles.
Heidelberg: Springer, 2005.
Czerkas, Sylvia J., and Stephen A. Czerkas. Dinosaurs: A Global View. New
York: Mallard Press, 1991.
Websites to Visit
The University of California Museum of Paleontology, The Paleontological

Society of Franklin and Marshall College (Lancaster, PA), The Society of
Vertebrate Paleontology at the University of Texas (Austin), and the United
States Geological Society sponsor The Paleontology Portal —
www.paleoportal.org
LECTURE EIGHT
34
Lecture 9:
Dinosaur Diversity
The Suggested Reading for this lecture is Paul Barrett’s National

Geographic Dinosaurs.
o one knows how many kinds of dinosaurs there were.

One recent study says that 527 genera have been
described thus far but estimates that up to 1,850 may
have actually existed. If this is accurate, only about 29
percent of all dinosaur genera have as yet been discov-
ered. Even with 527 dinosaur genera, that seems a lot to
try to describe. But dinosaur classification is fairly sim-
ple. To begin with, there were only two main groups, or
“clades,” of dinosaurs.
In 1887, a dinosaur expert named Harry Govier Seeley recognized that all
dinosaurs had one of two basic hip arrangements. Seeley named one group
Saurischia, which means “reptile-hipped,” and the other Ornithischia, mean-
ing “bird-hipped.” Dinosaur hips comprised three big bones: the ilium bone,
which articulates with the vertebral column, the pubis bone, which is below
the ilium and tends to face forward, and the ischium bone, which is below
the ilium and faces backward. The open acetabulum, where the head of the
femur (thigh bone) articulates, is at the juncture of the three hip bones. In
the case of Saurischians, the pubis is normally strongly forward and the ilium
is deep and crescent-shaped. But in the Ornithischians, the pubis aligns par-
allel to the ischium and faces to the rear. A spur called the prepubis faces
forward. The ilium is elongated and anvil shaped. The Ornithiscians also had
a character absent in the Saurischia, a bone called the predentary at the
very front of their lower jaw.
Dinosaurs, like most other animals, are classified using a system called
phylogenetic systematics, or, more simply, cladistics. This system involves
the careful measurement of dozens, if not hundreds, of characters on each
specimen. Then, using an algorithm, a computer compares each animal for
all characters and produces a tree-like diagram depicting the most parsimo-
nious comparative arrangement, a so-called cladogram showing degrees of
similarity. The assumption is that the more similar they are for specific char-
acters, the more closely related they are in the evolutionary sense. For
dinosaurs, skeletal characters are obviously most used to generate clado-
grams. Cladistics has proven very useful in understanding dinosaur phyloge-
ny, the evolutionary relationship among dinosaur groups.
There are only two groups of dinosaurs within the Saurischia and they are well
known, indeed, the very icons of Dinosauria. They are the plant-eating Sauro-
podomorphs, which include the huge long-necks such as DIPLODOCUS and
APATOSAURUS, and the Theropoda, the meat-eaters that range from tiny COMP-
SOGNATHUS to the fierce VELOCIRAPTOR to the immense TYRANNOSAURUS REX.
35
The Sauropodomorphs include the Prosauropods from the late Triassic and
the true Sauropods from the Jurassic to the end of the Cretaceous. These
long-necked, long-tailed, elephantine behemoths were the largest animals
ever to dwell on land. Their heads were generally tiny in comparison with
their bodies and their teeth were usually simple peg or pencil-like. They must
have scraped and swallowed massive amounts of plant material and ground
it within their stomach. Fossil skeletons are sometimes found with smooth
stones called “gastroliths” that the animals may have swallowed to aid in
grinding plant material. The largest complete skeletons are those of
DIPLODOCUS (twenty tons), APATOSAURUS (thirty-five tons), CAMARASAURUS
(twenty tons), and BRACHIOSAURUS (up to fifty tons). But some were apparent-
ly larger and heavier. SEISMOSAURUS is estimated to have reached one hun-
dred fifteen feet in length, MAMENCHISAURUS had a neck that alone measured
thirty-two feet, and SUPERSAURUS and ULTRASAURUS, may have each exceed-
ed fifty tons in weight.
The Theropoda comprise all of the carnivorous dinosaurs. They were per-
haps the earliest dinosaurs to evolve and were present until the end of the
Cretaceous. Their classification is complex as there were many kinds of
varying sizes and characteristics. They are best known by species such as
ALLOSAURUS of the Jurassic and TYRANNOSAURUS of the Cretaceous, but in
recent years, smaller species such as DEINONYCHUS and VELOCIRAPTOR have
gotten much attention. Birds appear to be descended from a group of
theropods called Dromaeosaurs, thus birds are really a modern form of
Saurischian dinosaur. Various groups of theropods (besides true birds) may
have had feathers and one bizarre group, the Therizinosaurs, may have
been adapted primarily to a diet of vegetation.
As far as anyone knows, all Ornithischians were herbivores, existing entire-
ly on a diet of plant food. There were four major groups, the Fabrosaurs, the
Ornithopoda, the Thyreophora, and the Marginocephalia.
The Fabrosaurs were a group of early bipedal Ornithischians typified by a
small (six feet in length) dinosaur named LESOTHOSAURUS. There is some
question as to how fabrosaurs should be classified. Some think they are
early ornithopods, but they differ from true ornithopods because they lack a
number of skeletal characteristics, including cheeks. Nonetheless, they may
have been ancestors of true ornithopods. All were relatively small, adapted
for speed, and only present from the late Triassic until the early Jurassic.
The Ornithopoda were a diverse and abundant group, especially in the mid
to late Cretaceous. Though capable of bipedal movement, they likely walked
most commonly on all fours. Many had tails reinforced with bony tendons
that kept the tail stiff, balancing against the weight of the front of the animal.
Jurassic ornithopods included the generalized CAMPTOSAURUS found among
the dinosaurs of the Morrison Formation. Weighing only about six hundred
pounds, it resembled a small IGUANODON. The iguanodonts, including
LECTURE NINE
TENONTOSAURUS, IGUANODON, MAIASAURA, and ANATOTITAN, ranged in weight

from as little as six hundred sixty pounds to up to seven-and-a-half tons.
Their most distinctive characteristics were their teeth and jaws, which were
well adapted to grinding massive amounts of plant food. The upper jaw
could widen as the lower jaw closed, aiding in grinding vegetation. Hundreds
36
of teeth within fleshy cheeks chewed plants into a pulp before swallowing.
The hadrosaurs, often called duck-billed dinosaurs, included some species
that developed elaborate crests of bone on their heads. Aside from size,
their bodies were scarcely different but their heads were each distinct. Like
the iguanodonts they had cheeks and jaws well adapted to chewing and
grinding vegetation. Teeth were easily replaceable, arranged in batteries in
the jaw and numbering in the thousands. The crests on some hadrosaurs
may have served for species recognition both by appearance and by the
unique sound they likely provided when the animal vocalized.
The Thyreophorans include two groups, the Stegosaurs, primarily Jurassic,
and the Ankylosaurs, mostly Cretaceous. All were quadripedal and their fore
legs were shorter than their hind legs. Thyreophorans are grouped together
for their unique forms of bony armor. They typically have bony plates,
spikes, or imbedded bone within the skin, all presumably for protection and
defense. Stegosaurs are best known for the prominent bony plates that
adorned their backs. No one knows exactly what the function of these plates
might have been. Some ankylosaurs had tails stiffened by bony tendons that
terminated in a mace-like bony club. The largest of the stegosaurs weighed
about two-and-a-half tons and the largest of the ankylosaurs weighed about
four tons.
Marginocephalians are Cretaceous dinosaurs that have a bony extension
beyond the rear or “margin” of the skull. They include two groups, the
Pachycephalosaurs and the Ceratopsians. Pachycephalosaur literally means
“bone-head,” an apt description. These bipedal dinosaurs typically had a
skull of thickened bone adorned with spikes and tubercles. The utility of
such a skull can only be speculated upon. The largest species weighed
between one and two tons. Ceratopsians were abundant in North America
and many are also found in Asia, particularly Mongolia. They are rhinoceros-
like, bulky quadripeds with immense heads that feature a frill of bone
extending well over the neck. Many had horns either on the frill or protruding
from the face, above the eyes and on the snout. TRICERATOPS is the best
known and largest of the Ceratopsians, weighing up to six tons. Large herds
of Ceratopsians were present during the late Cretaceous, and immense
bone beds of species such as CENTROSAURUS have been unearthed along
the Red Deer River in Alberta, Canada.
37

Questions
1. What characteristics distinguish the two major groups of dinosaurs,

Saurischia and Ornithischia?
2. Name and describe the various groups of dinosaurs found within the
Saurischia and Ornithiscia?
Suggested Reading
Barrett, Paul. National Geographic Dinosaurs. Washington, D.C.: National
Geographic Society, 1999.
Currie, Philip J., and Kevin Padian, eds. Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs. New
York: Academic Press, 1997.
Dixon, Dougal. The Complete Book of Dinosaurs. London: Hermes
House, 2006.
Fastovsky, David E., and David B. Weishampel. The Evolution and Extinction
of Dinosaurs. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Norman, David. The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs. New York:
Crescent Books, 1985.
Websites to Visit
Dino Data is a website involved in all aspects of dinosaur studies (requires

registration) — http://dinodata.org/index.php
LECTURE NINE
38
Lecture 10:
Dinosaurs Become Dynamic
The Suggested Reading for this lecture is Robert T. Bakker’s The

Dinosaur Heresies.
ichard Owen, who coined the name “dinosaur,” was

impressed by the large size of dinosaur bones. He recog-
nized dinosaurs as reptilian but, from the few bones avail-
able to him, he reconstructed them to appear more like
mammals (such as a rhinoceros) than typical reptiles. Still,
he never argued forcefully that they behaved as mammals
do. As more dinosaur fossils were unearthed, Thomas
Henry Huxley, the articulate and feisty defender of
Darwinism, suggested that dinosaur anatomy was like
that of warm-blooded, active animals, not sluggish reptiles. Huxley based part
of his argument on a fossil of ARCHAEOPTERYX, the first bird. It was clear to
Huxley that ARCHAEOPTERYX’s skeleton closely resembled that of small carniv-
orous dinosaurs, animals that, in Huxley’s view, were adapted for high levels
of activity. Huxley’s assertions that dinosaurs might have been warm-blooded
and that birds might have evolved from dinosaurs, were largely forgotten for
more than a century and dinosaurs were regarded metabolically as large ver-
sions of iguanas and crocodiles. They were envisioned as cumbersome, slug-
gish behemoths, living their Mesozoic lives in reptilian “slow motion.”
This view began to change in 1964 when Yale paleontologist John Ostrom dis-
covered a small (about the size of a human) predatory dinosaur named
DEINONYCHUS (the name translates to “terrible claw”) in Montana. Ostrom’s
detailed study led him to draw a very different view of dinosaurs from what pre-
vailed at the time. The anatomy of DEINONYCHUS was, in Ostrom’s opinion, that
of a rapidly-moving predator capable of sustained pursuit, a predator of great
agility. DEINONYCHUS had an enlarged sickle-like claw on its second toe and its
articulation with the foot was such that the toe could be easily swung back and
forth. It would have been ideal to eviscerate prey. The dinosaur’s arms were
long, its three-fingered hands very large and capable of rotation at the wrist.
The tail was stiffened with bony tendons that kept it straight though it could be
raised, lowered, or swiveled at the hip. The tail would have allowed the animal
to balance while it maneuvered. From the fossils Ostrom excavated, he sug-
gested that DEINONYCHUS may have hunted in packs and thus killed prey con-
siderably larger than themselves. Fossil evidence for this possibility exists.
Ostrom suggested that such a dynamic anatomy was inconsistent with that
of typical ectotherms. In other words, he did not believe the animal could
have functioned as a cold-blooded creature, but must have been warm-blood-
ed to sustain a high activity level. Ostrom argued that DEINONYCHUS was likely
to have been endothermic, a suggestion that was soon enthusiastically
embraced and amplified by his student, then still an undergraduate, Robert
Bakker (b.1945).
39
Bakker extended Ostrom’s idea of endothermy in DEINONYCHUS to encom-
pass the entire diverse array of dinosaurs. Bakker believed that even the
largest dinosaurs, huge species such as BRACHIOSAURUS and APATOSAURUS,
were endothermic, their physiology much more like that of an elephant or
giraffe than a tortoise or crocodile. Bakker’s articulate and persistent argu-
ments in favor of dinosaur endothermy soon created intense debate, some of
it heated and contentious. As with all of science, from controversy comes
research and from research comes knowledge. Ostrom and Bakker had, in
effect, created what has been described (by Bakker, though others firmly
agree) as a “Dinosaur Renaissance,” where morphology as well as the
behavior and ecology of dinosaurs has been seriously re-examined and, in
general, significantly revised. Bakker elaborated his arguments in favor of
dinosaur endothermy in a unique book, The Dinosaur Heresies (1986), that
was readily accessible to lay readers, but was widely read, discussed, and
debated by professionals. Initially greeted by many professionals with strong
skepticism, the argument that dinosaur physiology was more mammalian
than reptilian has gradually gained increasing acceptance.
There are several lines of argument that Bakker and others have put forth in
defense of dinosaur endothermy. None has proven to be conclusive and the
answer to the question may not be one of unambiguous ectothermy or
endothermy for all dinosaurs. Some dinosaurs were almost certainly
endothermic, but perhaps not all, perhaps not even most. There is a possible
“middle ground” that may apply, where some dinosaurs may have maintained
a steady and high body temperature, but were not strictly physiologically
endothermic, as mammals are.
Metabolism does not fossilize, nor does body temperature. What evidence is
there to examine? There are the fossils themselves. These consist mostly,
but not entirely, of skeletons, and there are thousands of dinosaur bones and
hundreds of articulated (or mostly articulated) skeletons. There is also fos-
silized dinosaur skin and tendons, eggs and nests, tracks, and feces.
Dinosaurs actually left quite a bit of information about themselves in the sedi-
mentary rocks of the Mesozoic. What does this array of clues tell us?
The most obvious evidence for dinosaurs as active, mammal-like animals
was what, at least subconsciously, impressed Richard Owen and Thomas
Huxley. It was also the basis of Ostrom’s argument regarding DEINONYCHUS.
Dinosaurs are morphologically (meaning their body structure) more like mam-
mals than they are like reptiles. Many, ranging from the chicken-sized
COMPSOGNATHUS to the immense predatory GIGANOTOSAURUS were fully
bipedal, presumably moving much like ostriches. Their center of gravity was
at the pelvis, with a long, muscular tail acting as a cantilever to the body and
head. The likely reason why TYRANNOSAURUS REX had extremely reduced fore-
arms was that the weight reduction adapted the animal to compensate for the
increased anterior weight of the huge (up to about five feet long) head. With
long legs and excellent weight balance, bipedal dinosaurs were capable of
LECTURE TEN
lengthy strides and efficient, sustained movement.

Among the quadripedal dinosaurs, particularly the sauropod giants such as
APATOSAURUS, their limbs were thick, positioned directly under their bodies,
like those of elephants and hippos, not approaching right angles to the body,
40
as is the case with alligators and lizards. Dinosaur giants balanced their
extreme weight atop their muscular legs and could walk easily for long dis-
tances, much as elephant herds do today. Some of the larger quadripedal
dinosaurs, such as TRICERATOPS, are thought to have even been capable of
galloping, though this suggestion remains controversial. Such sustained and
intensive activity requires a metabolism capable of supplying muscles with
large amounts of oxygen, a metabolism typical of endotherms.
Following the revelations in Bakker’s thinking, it is interesting to consider
why earlier depictions of dinosaurs misinterpreted their anatomy. Sauropods
such as APATOSAURUS and large carnivores, such as TYRANNOSAURUS, were
shown dragging their tails. Both of these types of dinosaur actually held their
tails erect. Fossilized dinosaur tracks never show evidence of the tail drag-
ging behind. Duck-billed dinosaurs such as IGUANODON and PARASAUROLOPHUS
were reconstructed to look like huge kangaroos, their long tails awkwardly
bent. In reality they held their bodies horizontally as they moved, their tails
stiffened by bony tendons that ran throughout the neural spines of the verte-
bral column. These erroneous reconstructions were largely the result of the
simple assumption that dinosaurs were “cold-blooded,” huge ectotherms that
were incapable of the sorts of movement permitted by an endothermic metab-
olism. After all, crocodiles and iguanas do drag their tails.
Overall, there is much about dinosaur anatomy to suggest active lifestyles,
but that was overlooked because of the mindset that these animals were rep-
tiles and must have functioned like crocodiles, turtles, and lizards. That notion
is now essentially abandoned.
41

Questions
1. What led John Ostrom to reexamine the question of whether or not some
dinosaurs may have been warm-blooded?
2. What arguments for dinosaur endothermy were put forth by Robert Bakker
and why is Bakker’s view known as a “dinosaur renaissance”?
Suggested Reading
Bakker, Robert T. The Dinosaur Heresies. New York: Zebra Books, 1986.
Bakker, Robert T. Raptor Red. New York: Bantam Books, 1995.

Desmond, Adrian J. The Hot-Blooded Dinosaurs: A Revolution in Paleontology.
New York: Dial Press, 1976.
Websites to Visit
An interview with Dr. Robert T. Bakker in which he discusses the “Dinosaur

Renaissance” — http://www.geocities.com/stegob/robertbakker.html
LECTURE TEN
42
Lecture 11:
Dinosaurs Become Airborne
The Suggested Reading for this lecture is Luis M. Chiappe’s Glorified

Dinosaurs: The Origin and Early Evolution of Birds.
harles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859.

One immediate objection to Darwin’s argument for gradual
evolution was that there are no obvious “missing links.”
But in 1860, just a year after the publication of Origin, a
single feather was found in a slab from a quarry in
Solnhofen, Bavaria. The feather was from a creature that
lived around a tropical lagoon during the Jurassic, some
150 million years ago. In every way, it appeared to be the
feather of a modern bird. And one year after that, a skeleton
of a dinosaur-like animal about the size of a pigeon was found with clear
impressions of feathers from the same location. Richard Owen purchased
the skeleton for the British Museum and described it as the first bird,
ARCHAEOPTERYX LITHOGRAPHICA. Owen’s argument was simple: it may have
looked anatomically like a dinosaur, but it was a bird because it had feathers
indistinguishable from those of modern birds.
Owen’s view was immediately challenged by his younger rival, Thomas
Henry Huxley, who argued that the “urvogel,” as it was termed, was anatom-
ically not a bird. He described the skeleton as that of a small dinosaur
similar to COMPSOGNATHUS. In short, here was Darwin’s missing link, a form
that links two major groups, in this case reptiles and birds. In Huxley’s view,
birds were descended from dinosaurs and ARCHAEOPTERYX was the proof.
Call it a bird if you want, but it was really a feathered dinosaur. Further,
Huxley believed Owen was rejecting his argument mostly because Owen
opposed Darwin’s theory and did not want to admit to a missing link
between dinosaurs and birds.
The matter of whether birds descended from dinosaurs rested unresolved
until it was re-examined by Gerhard Heilmann (1859–1946) in an exhaustive
study The Origin of Birds published in 1927. By then another even finer
skeleton of ARCHAEOPTERYX (named ARCHAEORNIS at the time) had been found
at Solnhofen. Heilmann examined every detail and concluded that birds and
dinosaurs were alike, bone for bone, in all critical details save one. Birds had
a wishbone, or furcula (representing fused clavicles, the “shoulder bones”).
No dinosaur fossil had ever been found with a furcula. Heilmann concluded
that dinosaurs had lost the furcula during their evolution. He believed that
once a structure was lost, it was never re-evolved. Because dinosaurs had
lost their furculas, they could not have given rise to birds. Heilmann conclud-
ed that the compelling resemblance between ARCHAEOPTERYX and small
theropod dinosaurs must be an example of convergent evolution (when unre-
lated forms develop similar adaptations) and that the origin of birds was to be
found elsewhere in the fossil record.
43
That settled the matter until it was re-opened by John Ostrom in the mid-
1960s, at the time when Ostrom was studying DEINONYCHUS. At that time,
most paleontologists regarded the origin of birds to be somewhere within the
early archosaurs, perhaps in some distant line of thecodonts yet to be dis-
covered. Ostrom, in a detailed re-examination of ARCHAEOPTERYX, revived
Huxley’s view that birds descended directly from theropod dinosaurs. This
view accorded well with Ostrom’s and later Bakker’s assertions about warm-
blooded, active dinosaurs.
Since that initial discovery of a single feather in 1860, nine other partial or
relatively complete ARCHAEOPTERYX fossils have been found, all from the
same general area. Thus the entire database is a mere ten specimens.
ARCHAEOPTERYX has always been controversial. Could it fly? If so, how well
did it fly? If not, could it glide efficiently? Did it live in trees or was it cursorial,
running on the ground? If it did fly, how did flight evolve, from the “ground up”
or from the “trees down”? The answers to none of the above questions is
known with any degree of real certainty, although most anatomists who have
studied the animal believe it was capable of sustained flight, though not nec-
essarily on a par with that of modern birds.
What we do know about ARCHAEOPTERYX is this. Its jaws bore teeth, unlike
the toothless beaks of modern birds. Its braincase was smaller than modern
birds of comparable size, but large relative to comparably sized terrestrial
dinosaurs. It had a long forearm with three fingers and its wrist had a unique
carpal bone shaped sort of like a “half-moon,” so it is called the semilunate
carpal. This made its wrist dexterous, able to fold the wing. The hand was
large, longer, in fact, than the forearm. Many bones were hollow, as is the
case with birds and theropod dinosaurs. The tail was long and feathered on
both sides, unlike modern birds that have a short, compressed series of ver-
tebrae called a pygostyle to support the tail feathers. ARCHAEOPTERYX had a
tail like a dinosaur, but with feathers. It had a furcula, or wishbone, and it
most definitely was covered with feathers. In addition to these characters, it
had numerous other skeletal characters that are shared by one particular
group of dinosaurs to be discussed shortly.
Following John Ostrom’s re-examination of ARCHAEOPTERYX and his con-
tention that the bird-dinosaur relationship should be re-considered, Jacques
Gauthier, who specializes in phylogenetic systematics (cladistics) was one of
several to do just that. These analyses repeatedly showed that well over one
hundred skeletal characters were held in common by ARCHAEOPTERYX and a
group of dinosaurs called dromaeosaur maniraptorans. Cladograms produced
by these analyses showed ARCHAEOPTERYX clearly nested within one particular
group of saurichian theropod dinosaurs, the dromaeosaurs. At least according
to the cladists, it was indeed a dinosaur.
But what about the original problem of the furcula? Heilmann’s claim was the
LECTURE ELEVEN
dinosaurs lacked furculas. But they did not. Since Heilmann’s study, now
eight decades old, theropod dinosaurs with furculas have been unearthed,
dinosaurs ranging from VELOCIRAPTOR to TYRANNOSAURUS. Theropod dinosaurs
most certainly did have furculas, but the furcula is a small bone, even on a T.
REX, and is apt to be lost. Thus it takes a remarkably complete specimen for
the furcula to be present. Heilmann’s difficulty is solved.
44
What about feathers? Don’t feathers make birds unique? Did dinosaurs
have feathers?
Feathers perform multiple functions: signaling devices, flight, and heat con-
servation. Feathers are superb insulators and thus are essential to support
warm-bloodedness (endothermy) in relatively small animals such as birds,
just as hair does for mammals.
Though feathers are always associated with birds, indeed in the modern par-
lance they basically define birds, the fossil record has revealed that they were
not confined to birds, as they are today. Various “non-avian dinosaurs” have
been discovered with feathers. Feathers are not even confined to the immedi-
ate clade that contains the birds. Therizinosaurs had feathers, at least some of
them. And, as will be discussed in lecture thirteen, T. REX may have been
feathered, at least when it was immature. In other words, feathers of various
sorts may have occurred widely among theropod dinosaurs. The apparent
evolutionary linkage between birds and dinosaurs, the existence of feathers in
multiple dinosaur clades (all within the theropods), and the fact that feathers
function in part as insulators strengthens the contention that at least among
the small, active theropods such as DEINONYCHUS (a maniraptor), endothermy
was likely. Thus the notion of warm-blooded dinosaurs is linked directly to the
research suggesting that birds evolved from one dinosaur lineage.
Even now, not all professionals agree that birds evolved from dinosaurs. All
of the non-avian feathered dinosaurs are from the Cretaceous, after
ARCHAEOPTERYX, which was late Jurassic. Thus if dinosaurs did give rise to
ARCHAEOPTERYX, that ancestral theropod dinosaur has yet to be discovered.
Objections have also been raised about how flight might have evolved. If
dinosaurs were ancestors to birds, did birds really evolve from running
dinosaurs, from the ground up? Many think such a scenario is unlikely, and
theropod dinosaurs were not generally known to inhabit trees.
However, many recent discoveries coming from places like Laioning, China,
are adding strength to the hypothesis that birds are, in fact, descended from
dromaeosaurs. A dromaeosaur named Microraptor gui is fully feathered,
including having its hind legs feathered similar to its wings. It was likely
arboreal, but the question of whether or not it could fly is unanswered.
CAUDIPTERYX was a dinosaur with short arms that bore feathers, as did the
tip of its long tail.
In June 2007, a paper published in the journal Nature reported a new
species of dinosaur from Inner Mongolia that was described as “an enormous
feathered chicken.” The animal, GIGANTORAPTOR ERLIENENSIS, would have
stood seventeen feet tall, able to look a T. REX in the eye, with a weight of
three thousand one hundred pounds. It is by far the largest known member of
a group called oviraptors, known to have nested in a manner similar to birds.
The dinosaur had a relatively small head, was toothless, but with a strong
beak-like mouth. It is suspected to have dined on fruits and other forms of
plant food. It may have taken small animals too.
In March 2007, a team of scientists published a paper in Nature that ana-
lyzed the size of bone cells in dinosaurs and related that to bone-cell size
among living vertebrates. They found the bone-cell size in living vertebrates
45
correlates closely with the size of the genome, the amount of genetic material
per cell. Dinosaur bone-cell size most closely resembles that of birds, leading
the researchers to conclude that dinosaurs had small genomes, just as mod-
ern birds do.
The question of bird ancestry remains open to some, but it is fair to say at
this point that the majority of vertebrate paleontologists and likely the majority
of ornithologists share the opinion that birds represent the one surviving
branch of what was once a dense evolutionary bush of the Dinosauria. The
fossil record has revealed a compelling anatomic similarity between birds and
theropod dinosaurs. Evidence also exists that some dinosaurs were warm-
blooded, feathered, made nests, and brooded young, just as modern birds.
LECTURE ELEVEN
46

Questions
1. What characteristics of ARCHAEOPTERYX liken it to dinosaurs and why was it

nonetheless considered to be a bird?
2. Why did Gerhard Heilmann reject classifying ARCHAEOPTERYX as a dinosaur
and why was his view inaccurate?
Suggested Reading
Chiappe, Luis M. Glorified Dinosaurs: The Origin and Early Evolution of Birds.
Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2007.

Dingus, Lowell, and Timothy Rowe. The Mistaken Extinction: Dinosaur
Evolution and the Origin of Birds. New York: Freeman, 1997.
Heilmann, Gerhard. The Origin of Birds. Reprint. New York: Dover, 1972.
Shipman, Pat. Taking Wing: Archaeopteryx and the Evolution of Bird Flight.
New York: Touchstone, 1998.
Journal Articles
Organ, Chris L., Andrew M. Shedlock, Andrew Meade, Mark Pagel, and
Scott V. Edwards. “Origin of Avian Genome Size and Structure in Non-
Avian Dinosaurs.” Nature. Volume 446. Number 7132. pp. 180–184.
March 8, 2007.
Xu, Xing, Qingwei Tan, Jianmin Wang, Xijin Zhao, and Lin Tan. “A Gigantic
Bird-like Dinosaur from the Late Cretaceous of China.” Nature. Volume
447. Number 7146. pp. 844–847. June 14, 2007.
Websites to Visit
The University of California Museum of Paleontology devotes a detailed arti-

cle on the dinosaur-bird connection —
http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/diapsids/avians.html
47
Lecture 12:
Dinosaurs as Living Animals
The Suggested Reading for this lecture is Judith G. Scotchmoor, Brent

H. Breithaupt, Dale A. Springer, and Anthony R. Fiorillo’s (eds.)
Dinosaurs: The Science Behind the Stories.
inosaur bone is often sufficiently well preserved that histo-

logical studies (for instance, details of cell structure)
may be done on it. Examination of the fine structure of
bone from various dinosaurs shows features more typi-
cal of mammalian and avian bone than of reptilian
bone. It also shows rings of growth that are useful in
documenting the rate at which the animal grew and to
what age it lived. Dinosaurs such as APATOSAURUS had
what is called laminar, fibrolamellar bone, a kind of bone
associated with rapid vascularization (blood vessel presence) and growth.
The histological evidence suggests that a thirty-ton APATOSAURUS that
hatched from an egg smaller than a volleyball is likely to have attained adult
size when it was a mere twenty years old. If an ectothermic metabolism is
presumed to have been the case, it would have taken about five times as
long for the creature to reach adulthood. Such a life history, where a century
is required to attain reproductive age, is obviously unlikely.
Other characteristics of fossil bone suggest that dinosaurs of all sizes were
essentially homeothermic (able to maintain a relatively high and constant
body temperature). The ratio of oxygen-16 to oxygen-18 varies with body
temperature and can be measured from fossil bones. Dinosaur bone has a
ratio typical of what is seen in mammals and birds, not reptiles.
One of Robert Bakker’s arguments in support of dinosaur endothermy was
based on food chains. Endothermic (high metabolism) animals require far
more food per gram of body weight than do ectotherms. A community of prey
animals could sustain approximately five to ten times more ectothermic than
endothermic predators of similar body mass because ectothermy is so much
less costly per animal. As shown by Bakker, a standing crop of one hundred
tons of prey animals would sustain forty tons of ectothermic Komodo dragon
lizards (assuming each lizard weighed about three hundred thirty pounds).
But one hundred tons of prey would only sustain two-and-a-half tons of three
hundred thirty pound endothermic African lions.
Bakker argued that predatory dinosaurs such as ALLOSAURUS and TYRANNO-
SAURUS are rare in fossil deposits relative to the abundance of herbivorous
LECTURE TWELVE
dinosaurs (prey). In Bakker’s analysis, the ratio of prey to predator is typical

of today’s endothermic-dominated ecosystems such as the African Serengeti.
However, most dinosaur experts believe that there is simply too much uncer-
tainty about relative dinosaur population sizes as revealed by the fossil record
to support Bakker’s claims.
48
Groups of fossilized dinosaur nests (representing several species) have
been found along with eggs in several widely scattered locations. One well-
known site is Egg Mountain in the Montana badlands, discovered by Jack
Horner (b. 1946). Horner and his colleagues have made a detailed study of a
fossilized nesting colony of MAIASAURA PEEBLESORUM, an ornithopod herbivo-
rous dinosaur that lived during the late Cretaceous period, between seventy-
three and eighty million years ago. The young dinosaurs grew quickly.
Hatching size was about twenty inches, but they grew to a length of ten feet
within one or two years, all the while remaining at the nest, almost certainly
tended by parents. Adulthood was reached within eight years and the adults
were about twenty-three to thirty feet long and weighed between two to three
tons. The growth rate of this species is typical of birds and mammals, not
reptiles. It suggests a high metabolism typical of endothermy.
Studies of fossilized dinosaur tracks indicate that some dinosaurs apparently
moved in herds and likely made seasonal migrations, especially those
species that inhabited polar regions.
Fossil dinosaurs from places such as Alaska, Antarctica, and Australia
(which, in the Cretaceous period, was still partly below the Antarctic Circle)
show that dinosaurs lived in regions subject to protracted darkness and possi-
ble cold. It is difficult to reconcile such adaptiveness with a fully cold-blooded
physiology. There are no extant reptiles that live within high polar regions, at
least not during the dark of the polar winter.
Some dinosaur experts do not believe all dinosaurs were warm-blooded or
endothermic. If the large herbivorous dinosaurs were endothermic, how could
immense creatures such as APATOSAURUS and BRACHIOSAURUS consume suffi-
cient plant food to sustain their high metabolic rates? Not only would they
seemingly need to constantly feed but they would be very likely to have eaten
the landscape bare of plants. Would there have been sufficient plant food to
sustain large populations of huge herbivores?
Another argument against endothermy is found in dinosaur skulls. Mammals
and birds have bones called turbinates in the nasal regions of their skulls.
Turbinates support membranes that are essential for moisture conservation.
Birds and mammals would dehydrate from the movement and subsequent
evaporation of warm, moisture-laden air through their nostrils (during exhala-
tion) if it were not for the turbinates, which recapture the moisture. Ecto-
thermic reptiles lack turbinates and so, apparently, do dinosaurs, though the
evidence in some dinosaur groups is not entirely clear. Certain groups show
indications of what may have been turbinates (the bones are delicate and do
not easily fossilize). But if dinosaurs lacked turbinates and were endothermic,
why did they not dehydrate?
Many students of dinosaur anatomy have suggested that the large dinosaurs
would not have evolved endothermy because large dinosaurs, by virtue of size
alone, were capable of maintaining a steady high body temperature. But how?
Large dinosaurs would have high volume relative to surface area and thus
accumulate metabolic heat. Simply by bulk alone, they would warm.
Calculations suggest that a dinosaur such as a MAIASAURUS had about five
times the metabolic rate of a Komodo dragon lizard and was essentially
49
endothermic, just based on its bulk alone. Animals with large volume tend to
gain heat. This is well below the metabolic rate of a mammal of approximate
equal weight. Extending the argument, small dinosaurs (nine to forty-four
pounds) would require metabolic rates ten times that of reptiles, rates typical
of mammals and small birds. These may indeed have been endothermic.
Medium-sized dinosaurs (two hundred twenty to two thousand two hundred
pounds) would need a metabolic rate of six to eight times that of reptiles, and
large dinosaurs (four-and-a-half to eleven tons) would, like the MAIASAURUS
cited above, require a metabolism five times that of reptiles. The largest of
the dinosaurs, the giant sauropods (twenty-two to eighty-eight tons) would
have metabolic rates only three to four times those of a reptile. This variation
in metabolic rate based on dinosaur mass is called mesometabolism.
If dinosaurs did exhibit mesometabolism it would be age dependent in those
with large body mass. A juvenile TYRANNOSAURUS would have a metabolism
ten times that of a reptile, a metabolism comparable to that of a mammal or
bird. But by the time it reached adulthood, its metabolic rate would drop by at
least half.
The ecological implications of mesometabolism are striking. An animal
such as a TRICERATOPS (six-and-a-half tons) would need only as much food
as a modern bison (eighteen hundred pounds). An APATOSAURUS would only
need as much food as a modern elephant to sustain itself. The terrestrial
ecosystems of the Mesozoic would not have been energetically much differ-
ent from those throughout the Cenozoic, when mammals became the domi-
nant large animals.
LECTURE TWELVE
50

Questions
1. How do scientists estimate how rapidly dinosaurs grew to adult size?

2. Why might some of the largest dinosaurs have not been fully endothermic?
Suggested Reading
Scotchmoor, Judith G., Brent H. Breithaupt, Dale A. Springer, and Anthony R.

Fiorillo, eds. Dinosaurs: The Science Behind the Stories. Alexandria, VA:
American Geological Institute, 2002.
Colagrande, John, and Larry Felder. In the Presence of Dinosaurs.

Alexandria, VA: Time-Life, 2000.
Horner, John R. Dinosaur Lives. San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1997.
Psihoyos, Louie. Hunting Dinosaurs. New York: Random House, 1994.
Websites to Visit
1. The National Geographic Society provides a detailed site discussing dino-

saur eggs, including the virtual “hatching” of several types of dinosaurs —
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/dinoeggs
2. The Stone Company of Boulder, CO, provides a good general discussion
about dinosaur eggs by dinosaur enthusiast Florence Magovern —
http://www.stonecompany.com/dinoeggs/study/eggstudy.html
51
Lecture 13:
T. REX Deconstructed and Reconstructed
The Suggested Reading for this lecture is John R. Horner and Don
Lessem’s The Complete T. Rex.
he most infamous of the dinosaurs is, of course,

TYRANNOSAURUS REX, star attraction at museums, best
supporting dinosaur in the original King Kong, and
deserving of an Oscar for its stellar performance in
Jurassic Park. Who can forget that final scene when the
T. REX hurls a VELOCIRAPTOR against a dinosaur skeleton,
crumbling it, and turns and lets out a final, climactic roar, as a
banner falls saying “When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth.”
Since its initial discovery near Hell Creek, Montana, about
a century ago, approximately thirty partial or nearly complete skeletons of
T. REX have been unearthed. Thus paleontologists have a sound understand-
ing of its anatomy. Some of the most complete T. REX skeletons are even
named, such as the famous “Sue,” for Susan Hendrickson, who first found it.
This skeleton was the focus of a protracted legal battle and was eventually
auctioned by Sotheby’s for 8.36 million dollars. The dinosaur is on exhibit at
the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. Other T. REX names include
“Stan,” “Duffy,” “Bucky,” “Peck’s rex,” and “Black Beauty.”
T. REX has been historically depicted as walking upright, its head high in the
air, its tail dragging behind it. This inaccuracy was recently corrected, result-
ing in the literal deconstruction and reconstruction of T. REX specimens at
various museums, including at the American Museum of Natural History. In
reality, T. REX held its body horizontally, its dense muscular tail balancing its
forward body with the center of gravity just in front of the hips. The unusually
small arms that characterized T. REX may have been an adaptation to
reduce its forward weight. In any case the arms, with two-fingered hands,
were strong and functional, the bones showing large muscle scarring.
Perhaps its arms aided the animal in rising from the ground, as, when
resting, it would have squatted like a rooster.
The largest of the T. REX specimens has been estimated to weigh as much
as seven tons, though extrapolated dinosaur body weights are difficult to
know with great precision. The massive skull is nearly five feet in length. The
skull is unusual in that it is much wider from the eyes to the rear than in front
of the eyes. Thus the orbits (eye sockets) are positioned such that a T. REX
LECTURE THIRTEEN
must have had stereoscopic vision. Teeth were serrated, chisel-like, and con-
ical, not blade-like as in allosaurs. A T. REX could easily crush bone with its
massive teeth and incredible jaw strength. Its long snout plus reconstructions
of its brain anatomy (based on casts made from various skulls) show that T.
REX had, like many dinosaurs, a very well developed olfactory sense. Bob
Bakker has reported the presence of turbinate bones in the snout, which
52
would indicate a very keen sense of smell. Further, its inner ear was very well
developed both for balance and for hearing. Likely its olfaction, vision, and
hearing were all quite excellent.
The legs were massive, particularly the dense thigh muscles. Like virtually
all theropods, T. REX walked on three toes. The thigh bone (femur) was rela-
tively long compared with the rest of the leg and foot and this indicates that T.
REX did not run fast relative to its size. Computer studies modeling the gait of
TYRANNOSAURUS REX indicate that it may have moved quickly as a juvenile but,
because of its immense body size and overall bulk, it slowed considerably by
the time it was a full-grown adult. Other studies based on extrapolations from
the musculature of crocodilians and chickens indicate that to run as fast as
forty-five miles per hour, a T. REX would have to have anywhere from 40 to 86
percent (depending on the mathematical model used) of its body mass in its
legs, clearly impossible. Unlike the sprinting, jeep-chasing “roadrunner from
Hell” depicted in the first Jurassic Park film, an adult T. REX likely moved no
faster than fifteen to twenty-five miles per hour. Its normal walking would
have been about eleven miles per hour, still a pretty good pace. But any jeep,
or, for that matter, a skilled biker, could outrun it. Moving as fast as twenty-
five miles per hour would have posed risks for a large T. REX, because if it
happened to fall, its very bulk could cause it to sustain lethal injuries.
T. REX grew to adulthood quickly. From an analysis of growth-lines in numer-
ous T. REX bones, researchers have concluded that a T. REX reached full
adult size by age twenty and likely lived for no more than about twenty-eight
years. Given that an adult conservatively weighed about five-and-a-half tons,
the animal grew at a rate of just under five pounds per day. It is difficult to
imagine such a rapid growth rate in a cold-blooded animal. No modern reptile
approaches such a rapid growth rate, but birds do.
Enough fossil skeletons of ALBERTOSAURUS (a tyrannosaur species somewhat
more light in weight and more slender than T. REX) were recovered from a
seventy-million-year-old site north of Calgary to permit scientists to analyze
age-related survivorship. Using bone growth line counts to establish age, they
found that juvenile animals between two and thirteen had high survivorship
(with an annual mortality rate of only about 3.5 percent), but after age thirteen
life must have become riskier. Between fourteen and twenty-three, the annual
death rate rose to 22.9 percent and virtually none of the animals survived
beyond age twenty-eight.
Bone studies even make it possible to identify the sex of a T. REX specimen.
In one fossil, unusually well preserved tissue inside the marrow cavity
appears identical to a certain kind of bone called medullary bone found only
in female birds. If T. REX bone is indeed medullary bone, it not only shows
that the animal in question was a female, but also supports the evolutionary
linkage between dinosaurs and birds. In the spring of 2007, studies also
reported that the protein collagen had been recovered from within the thigh
bone (femur) of a T. REX. Seven amino acid sequences of the collagen were
isolated and five of the seven were identical to those found in chickens, addi-
tional support for the relationship between birds and theropod dinosaurs.
T. REX inhabited North America at the end of the Cretaceous. It was not the
only tyrannosaur present. As mentioned above, a more gracile species,
53
Albertosaurus sarcophagus, is found abundantly in places such as the Red
Deer River in southern Alberta. Two other tyrannosaur species, Gorgosaurus
libratus and Daspletosaurus torosus, are both commonly found in various
places in western North America. And in Asia, there was a species quite simi-
lar to T. REX, TARBOSAURUS BATAAR. In addition, other dinosaurs have been
found that are cladistically nested within the tyrannosaurs. One of these is
Dilong paradoxus, first described in 2004. DILONG is from the early Cretaceous
in China and was small and gracile. It had long arms with three-fingered
hands. Most interesting is that one specimen appears to be covered with fila-
mentous structures thought to be primitive feathers. This discovery has led to
the suggestion that a juvenile T. REX may also have been covered by some
form of feathers, likely for heat retention. Given its great bulk, it is highly
doubtful that an adult would have been feathered. Yet another unique tyran-
nosaur was GUANLONG WUCAII, from the late Jurassic in China. This early but
amazing tyrannosaur was adorned with an elaborate bony head crest.
Dinosaur expert Jack Horner has argued that T. REX was too large to function
efficiently as a predator and must, instead, have scavenged for carcasses.
Was T. REX a giant vulture? The species lived at a time when immense herds
of herbivorous Ceratopsians and Hadrosaurs were present and there would
likely have been many carcasses to be scavenged. The large size of a
T. REX would have made it easy for the animal to displace other
scavengers at a carcass unless, of course, they also happened to be large
tyrannosaurs. The keen olfactory sense would have been adaptive for locating
carcasses. The powerful jaws and rounded, chisel-like teeth were ideal for
tearing into flesh and crushing bones. A T. REX was well adapted to eat a car-
cass, bones included.
On the other hand, there is no reason why a T. REX could not have easily
killed or mortally wounded a living animal if it could get its powerful jaws on it.
A T. REX may have functioned as an ambush predator, picking on sick or
injured prey that were unable to move quickly. The teeth of T. REX were ser-
rated and, like those of other theropods, were constantly being lost and
replaced. The jaws had a prominent overbite. It is quite likely, as is the case
with Komodo dragon lizards, that septic bacteria thrived in the bits and pieces
of flesh trapped among the jagged teeth and that the very bite of a T. REX
would eventually prove to be lethal due to bacterial infection. Thus a T. REX
need only have bitten its prey to deliver what would prove a mortal wound. It
would then merely follow it until it died. Thus predation and scavenging are
not mutually exclusive at least in the case of T. REX.
Scavenging among Tyrannosaurs would have likely been age related.
Juvenile and small animals would have been less likely to prevail at a car-
cass when larger animals were present. Likewise, juvenile and small animals
were likely faster and better adapted to safely pursue and subdue live prey.
LECTURE THIRTEEN
Thus it is possible that as it aged, a T. REX would gradually shift from mostly
predatory to mostly scavenging.
There is some paleontological evidence that T. REX associated with others of
its species in packs. Many specimens show facial wounds that look to have
been inflicted by other tyrannosaurs. Groups of tyrannosaurs may have fol-
lowed migrating herds of plant eaters and either combined in killing them or,
perhaps more likely, competed for access to carcasses.
54
Although many other dinosaurs have been described, including huge preda-
tors such as SPINOSAURUS and GIGANOTOSAURUS, there is still nothing quite
comparable to a T. REX. The scene in the second Jurassic Park film that
shows T. REX terrorizing downtown San Diego is amusing, but at the same
time sobering. The proportions are correct. This is an animal that could look
directly into a second- story window and was, in fact, larger than a bus. It
may not be a bad thing that, as fascinating as a T. REX must have been, it is
now extinct.
55

Questions
1. How have paleontologists discovered the probable longevity and calculated

the speed of T. REX?
2. What arguments have been made for T. REX being a scavenger rather than
a predator? Why might it have been both?
Suggested Reading
Horner, John R., and Don Lessem. The Complete T. rex. New York:
Touchstone, 1993.
Larson, Peter, and Kristin Donnan. Rex Appeal. Montpelier, VT: Invisible
Cities Press, 2004.
Paul, Gregory S. Predatory Dinosaurs of the World. New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1988.
Websites to Visit
1. The American Museum of Natural History features a study of T. REX —

http://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/expeditions/treasure_fossil/Treasures/
Tyrannosaurus/tyrannos.html?dinos
2. The Field Museum provides several pages about Sue the T. REX —
http://www.fieldmuseum.org/sue
LECTURE THIRTEEN
56
Lecture 14:
The Cretaceous Extinction Event
The Suggested Reading for this lecture is Walter T. Alvarez’s T. Rex and
the Crater of Doom.
he question I am asked more than any other about

dinosaurs is, What killed them? The large dinosaurs that
so fascinate us are all long gone, a fact that has pro-
duced no shortage of suggestions as to why. A perusal
of my many dinosaur books, some dating back over a half-
century, shows that the most repeated explanation is “cli-
mate change.” Details about just how the climate changed are
rarely supplied. Other ideas range widely and include such
notions as exploding stars, egg-eating mammals, lousy
parental care, and terminal constipation brought about by devouring newly
evolved flowering plants.
What killed the dinosaurs? There is no simple answer because dinosaurs
existed for one hundred sixty million years and in that vast period of time new
species continuously evolved and other species went extinct. Based on the
average species longevity of extant animals comparable to dinosaurs, the esti-
mate is that a given species of dinosaur might have been around for anywhere
from three to five million years. STEGOSAURUS STENOPS, the stegosaur common
in the late Jurassic in North America, was extinct for at least seventy million
years before T. REX evolved! That’s a time period longer than the entire Ceno-
zoic Era, the period from sixty-five million years ago to the present, when mod-
ern mammals have dominated the planet. Needless to say, STEGOSAURUS and
T. REX never met. So all the dinosaurs did not go extinct at once. Far from it.
Paleontologists recognize different patterns of extinction. There is back-
ground extinction, where a single species becomes extinct while others do
not. This sort of process is relatively constant, and is, of course, compensat-
ed (though not necessarily balanced) by ongoing speciation. There are minor
extinction events, such as the one that closed out the Jurassic period, where
numbers of species become extinct approximately at the same time. And
there are the five major extinction events (Ordovician, Devonian, Permian,
Triassic, and Cretaceous) that have resulted in major losses of multiple
species and essentially redirected patterns of evolution. T. REX appears to
have been a victim of a mass extinction event, the “K/T Event,” that ended
the Mesozoic and began the Cenozoic. Had that event not occurred, the
diversification of mammals and the subsequent evolution of our own species
is questionable at best.
There should be no surprise that dinosaurs were undergoing various
degrees of extinction since they first evolved in the late Triassic. The world
changed considerably over the 160 million years when dinosaurs dominated
terrestrial ecosystems. Continents became rearranged such that climate and
57
sea-level changes happened, new ocean basins formed, and some continen-
tal masses became totally isolated from others. The rearrangement of land-
masses may have had negative impacts on certain dinosaurs for reasons
ranging from major changes in temperature and precipitation to increased
interspecies competition and predation. During the Cretaceous period, flower-
ing plants ranging from magnolias and sycamores to various grasses
evolved, and with them we see changes in dinosaurs. Long-necked
SAUROPODS become less numerous as dinosaurs with more effective chewing
capabilities such as HADROSAURS and CERATOPSIANS become diverse and
abundant. A similar pattern is easily observed for large mammals if one fol-
lows their extinction patterns through the sixty-five million years of the
Cenozoic. As forests shrink and grasslands spread, as equitable climates
become more seasonal, patterns of mammal diversity shift. New mammals
specialized for grazing evolve and others become extinct.
The dinosaur extinction question is not usually about anything other than the
Mesozoic coup de grace, the so-called Cretaceous extinction event. This
was, after all, one of the five major extinctions. So for the remainder of this
lecture, that will be the focus.
A new book to be released in 2007 with the intriguing title What Bugged the
Dinosaurs suggests that proliferation and diversification of biting insects dur-
ing the Cretaceous may have had negative impacts on dinosaurs. Insects are
vectors for serious diseases and many ecologists are re-examining how
insects and the diseases they spread may affect evolutionary patterns among
vertebrates. Some paleontologists argue that dinosaurs were in decline, at
least regarding species diversity, as the Cretaceous drew to an end. Perhaps
insect-borne diseases had some role in such a decline, although other pale-
ontologists argue that their data do not show dinosaur decline before the
abrupt end of the Cretaceous. That question remains open.
But one thing is certain and that is that the Cretaceous mass extinction affect-
ed far more animal groups than dinosaurs. Whatever happened also resulted
in mass extinctions of oceanic zooplankton called foraminiferans. They are not
very much like dinosaurs. And, as well, all ammonites, which were marine
cephalopod mollusks similar to today’s chambered nautilus, became extinct.
And before leaving the seas, note that all plesiosaurs, ichthyosaurs, and
mosasaurs failed to survive the Cretaceous. On land, in addition to dinosaurs,
all of the pterosaurs, some with immense wing-spans, also suffered total
extinction. On the other hand, groups such as turtles, frogs and other amphib-
ians, snakes and lizards, crocodilians, modern birds, and mammals all passed
through the extinction filter. Why did they survive when dinosaurs and other
groups did not? In other words, the Cretaceous extinction event looks to have
been selective. Such selectivity demands explanation.
LECTURE FOURTEEN
Two prominent hypotheses to assign cause to the Cretaceous extinction

emerged over the past three decades. They are not mutually exclusive and,
in concert or individually, could have had devastating effects. These hypothe-
ses are (1) extreme volcanic activity inducing catastrophic global climate
change and (2) the impact of a six-mile-wide asteroid in the area of the
Yucatan Peninsula. There is little doubt that both of these possible causes
really did happen. What is debated is the actual ecological effects of each.
58
Looking first at volcanism, there is strong evidence for sustained and exten-
sive volcanic activity at the end of the Cretaceous at an area known as the
Deccan traps in India. The word “Deccan” refers to “southern” in Sanskrit and
the word “trap” means “staircase” in Dutch, for the step-like appearance of
the lava flows. The Deccan Traps were immense. In some areas, the thick-
ness is five hundred feet and in western India there is evidence of an eight
thousand foot thick lava flow. At its height, a total of seven hundred seventy-
two thousand square miles may have been covered, lava continuously
extruding from active volcanos. The immensity of this volcanic activity would
have produced dramatic global climatic effects. Dating the age of the flows
has proven somewhat difficult, but evidence now suggests that the volcanism
was in the Maastrichtian epoch, beginning a few million years before the end
of the Cretaceous. The climatic effects of extensive volcanism would have
been similar to that of asteroid impact to be discussed next.
Evidence of asteroid impact was first published in 1980 by a team headed
by Luis and Walter Alvarez, father and son. They were not investigating
dinosaur extinction. Rather, they were attempting to explain the origin of a
unique clay layer at the Cretaceous/Tertiary (K/T) boundary. The thin line of
clay was extraordinarily high in the element Iridium, a rare element on Earth
but common in asteroids and meteorites. The odd red and green clay was
soon found in other regions at the K/T boundary. It appeared to be global in
extent. The clay was shown to contain “shocked quartz,” a form of quartz with
fine lines that only happens during impacts or nuclear explosions. Also found
were tektites, small, black, glassy beads that form with impacts. Radiometric
dating of the tektites indicates an age of 65.01 million years, precisely at the
K/T boundary. The asteroid impact theory was highly controversial when first
put forth, but evidence mounted in its favor when the site of the proposed
immense crater was found.
In 1990, Alan Hildebrand, after dogged detective work, published the loca-
tion of the crater just off the northern tip of the Yucatan Peninsula. He named
it Chicxulub. The Mayan name is taken from a nearby village, and means “tail
of the devil.”
The entire crater is some one hundred twenty-five miles across and there is
now no doubt of its existence nor any doubt of its age, at the K/T boundary.
The crater was made by the impact of an asteroid about six miles in diame-
ter striking at an estimated speed of thirty-one thousand miles per hour on
an oblique angle that spewed masses of material toward North America. It
would have made a crater thirty miles in diameter within the first ten seconds
of impact and that crater would eventually be greater than one hundred
miles in diameter.
The impact, subsequent shock wave, and debris would have resulted in
calamitous global fires, dense and protracted clouding of the atmosphere, and
possibly intense acid rain. In short, it would produce catastrophic disruption in
food webs. Small animals may have been able to avoid the worst effects bet-
ter than the large dinosaurs simply by taking shelter, but many questions
remain about how, for example, such sensitive animals as frogs could have
escaped the effects of acid rain. Questions also remain about exactly how
long climatic effects would last and exactly what they might have been.
59
Regardless, it appears that the last of the dinosaurs went out with a bang,
perhaps the victims of a one-two punch, volcanism and extra-terrestrial
impact. What a way to go!
Dinosaurs such as STEGOSAURUS and T. REX will never return, but they will
likely always fascinate us. Go see their remains and those of other dinosaurs
in museums, visit some sites where their fossils have been found, and think
back on what they must have been like in their world. And should you want to
see any live dinosaurs, just put out a bird feeder.
LECTURE FOURTEEN
60

Questions
1. What are the two most prominent hypotheses for explaining the
Cretaceous extinction?
2. How does the K/T boundary provide evidence for an immense
asteroid impact?
Suggested Reading
Alvarez, Walter T. T. Rex and the Crater of Doom. Princeton: Princeton

Poinar, George, Jr., and Roberta Poinar. What Bugged the Dinosaurs?:
Insects, Disease, and Death in the Cretaceous. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
Raup, David M. Extinction: Bad Genes or Bad Luck? New York: W.W.
Norton, 1991.
Websites to Visit
1. The University of California Museum of Paleontology features an article by

Richard Cowen entitled “The K-T Extinction” —
http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/education/events/cowen1b.html
2. Dr. Ken Hooper’s website Virtual Paleontology Museum (Ottawa-Carleton
Geoscience Centre and Department of Earth Sciences Carleton University,
Ontario, Canada) features a thorough discussion of the K/T event —
http://park.org/Canada/Museum/extinction/tablecont.html
3. The University of Arizona, Department of Planetary Sciences website
Chicxulub Impact Event features a detailed analysis of the impact —
http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/SIC/impact_cratering/Chicxulub/Chicx_title.html
61
COURSE MATERIALS
The following books provide an excellent supplement to the lectures found in

this course:
Farlow, James O., and M.K. Brett-Surman, eds. The Complete Dinosaur. Bloomington,
IN: Indiana University Press, 1997.
Kricher, John. Peterson First Guide to Dinosaurs. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990.
Norman, David. Dinosaur! New York: Macmillan, 1991.
Paul, Gregory S., ed. The Scientific American Book of Dinosaurs. New York: St.
Martin’s Griffin, 2000.
Two technical books will be of use to those seeking more advanced material:
Glut, Donald F. Dinosaurs: The Encyclopedia. Jefferson, NC: McFarland &
Company, 1997.
Weishampel, David B., Peter Dodson, and Halszka Osmolska, eds. The
Dinosauria. 2nd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.
Suggested Readings:
Alvarez, Walter. T. Rex and the Crater of Doom. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1997.
Bakker, Robert T. The Dinosaur Heresies. New York: Zebra Books, 1986.
Barrett, Paul. National Geographic Dinosaurs. Washington, D.C.: National Geographic
Society, 1999.
Chiappe, Luis M. Glorified Dinosaurs: The Origin and Early Evolution of Birds.
Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2007.
Colbert, Edwin H. The Age of Reptiles. Reprint. Mineola, NY: Dover, 1997.
Gould, Stephen Jay, ed. The Book of Life. New York: W.W. Norton, 2001.
Horner, John R. Digging Dinosaurs. New York: Workman Publishing, 1988.
Horner, John R., and Don Lessem. The Complete T. rex. New York: Touchstone, 1993.
McGowan, Christopher. The Dragon Seekers: The Discovery of Dinosaurs
During the Prelude to Darwin. London: Little, Brown, 2001.
Norell, Mark A., Eugene S. Gaffney, and Lowell Dingus. Discovering Dinosaurs in the
American Museum of Natural History. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995.
Sanz, Jose Luis. Starring T. Rex!: Dinosaur Mythology and Popular Culture.
Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2002.
Scotchmoor, Judith G., Brent H. Breithaupt, Dale A. Springer, and Anthony R. Fiorillo,
eds. Dinosaurs: The Science Behind the Stories. Alexandria, VA: American
Geological Institute, 2002.
Wallace, David Rains. The Bonehunters’ Revenge. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999.
COURSE MATERIALS
Wilford, John Noble. The Riddle of the Dinosaur. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985.
Other Books of Interest:
Bakker, Robert T. Raptor Red. New York: Bantam Books, 1995.

Benton, Michael J. Vertebrate Paleontology. 3rd ed. Malden, U.K.: Blackwell, 2005.
Berry, Mark F. The Dinosaur Filmography. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and
Company, 2002.
62
COURSE MATERIALS
Other Books of Interest (continued):
Bird, Roland T. Bones for Barnum Brown. Fort Worth, TX: Texas Christian University
Press, 1985.
Burnie, David. The Kingfisher Illustrated Dinosaur Encyclopedia. New York:
Kingfisher, 2001.
Cain, Dana, and Mike Fredericks. Dinosaur Collectables. Norfolk, VA: Antique Trader
Books, 1999.
Cloudsley-Thompson, J.L. Ecology and Behavior of Mesozoic Reptiles. Heidelberg:
Springer, 2005.
Colagrande, John, and Larry Felder. In the Presence of Dinosaurs. Alexandria, VA:
Time-Life, 2000.
Colbert, Edwin H. Dinosaurs: An Illustrated History. Maplewood, NJ: Hammond,
Inc., 1983.
———. The Great Dinosaur Hunters and Their Discoveries. Reprint. New York:
Dover, 1984.
Currie, Philip J., and Kevin Padian, eds. Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs. New York:
Academic Press, 1997.
Czerkas, Sylvia J., and Stephen A. Czerkas. Dinosaurs: A Global View. New York:
Mallard Press, 1991.
Czerkas, Sylvia Massey, and Donald F. Glut. Dinosaurs, Mammoths, and Cavemen:
The Art of Charles R. Knight. New York: E.P. Dutton, Inc., 1982.
Debus, Allen A., and Diane E. Debus. Paleoimagery: The Evolution of Dinosaurs in Art.
Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2002.
de Camp, L. Sprague, and Catherine Cook de Camp. The Day of the Dinosaur. New
York: Doubleday & Company, 1968.
Desmond, Adrian J. The Hot-Blooded Dinosaurs: A Revolution in Paleontology. New
York: Dial Press, 1976.
Dingus, Lowell, and Timothy Rowe. The Mistaken Extinction: Dinosaur Evolution and
the Origin of Birds. New York: Freeman, 1997.
Dixon, Dougal. The Complete Book of Dinosaurs. London: Hermes House, 2006.
Fastovsky, David E., and David B. Weishampel. The Evolution and Extinction of
Dinosaurs. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Fortey, Richard. Life: A Natural History of the First Four Billion Years of Life on Earth.
New York: Vintage Books, 1997.
Gallenkamp, Charles. Dragon Hunter: Roy Chapman Andrews and the Central Asiatic
Expeditions. New York: Viking, 2001.
Glut, Donald F. The Dinosaur Scrapbook. Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1980.
Heilmann, Gerhard. The Origin of Birds. Reprint. New York: Dover, 1972.
Horner, John R. Dinosaur Lives. San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1997.
———. Dinosaurs Under the Big Sky. Missoula, MT: Mountain Press, 2001.
Lanham, Url. The Bone Hunters. New York: Columbia University Press, 1973.
Larson, Peter, and Kristin Donnan. Rex Appeal. Montpelier, VT: Invisible Cities
Press, 2004.
63
COURSE MATERIALS
Other Books of Interest (continued):
Lessem, Don. Dinosaurs Rediscovered. New York: Touchstone, 1992.

Norman, David. The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs. New York: Crescent
Books, 1985.
———. Prehistoric Life and the Rise of the Vertebrates. New York: Macmillan, 1994.
Novacek, Michael. Dinosaurs of the Flaming Cliffs. New York: Doubleday, 1996.
Ostrom, John H., and John S. McIntosh. Marsh’s Dinosaurs. New Haven: Yale
Paul, Gregory S. Predatory Dinosaurs of the World. New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1988.
Poinar, George, Jr., and Roberta Poinar. What Bugged the Dinosaurs?: Insects,
Disease, and Death in the Cretaceous. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2007.
Psihoyos, Louie. Hunting Dinosaurs. New York: Random House, 1994.
Rainger, Ronald. An Agenda for Antiquity: Henry Fairfield Osborn and Vertebrate
Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History, 1890–1935. Tuscaloosa,
AL: University of Alabama Press, 1991.
Raup, David M. Extinction: Bad Genes or Bad Luck? New York: W.W. Norton, 1991.
Reader, John. The Rise of Life: The First 3.5 Billion Years. New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1986.
Shipman, Pat. Taking Wing: Archaeopteryx and the Evolution of Bird Flight. New York:
Touchstone, 1998.
Sternberg, Charles Hazelius. Hunting Dinosaurs in the Bad Lands of the Red Deer
River, Alberta, Canada. Edmonton: NeWest Press, 1985.
Webber, Roy P. The Dinosaur Films of Ray Harryhausen. Jefferson, NC: McFarland
and Company, 2004.
Wallace, Joseph. The American Museum of Natural History’s Book of Dinosaurs and
Other Ancient Creatures. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994.
These books are available online through www.modernscholar.com
or by calling Recorded Books at 1-800-636-3399.
COURSE MATERIALS
64

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BEHOLD THE

Professor John Kricher

Recorded Books™ is a trademark of

Lecture content ©2007 by John Kricher

72007 by Recorded Books, LLC

Behold the Mighty Dinosaur

About Your Professor/Introduction ...............................................................................4

Lecture 1 What Is (or Was) a Dinosaur? ...............................................................6

Lecture 2 Digging Up Dinos...................................................................................9

Lecture 3 Dinosaurs Discovered..........................................................................12

Lecture 4 The Bone Wars....................................................................................16

Lecture 5 The Museum That Dinosaurs Built ......................................................19

Lecture 6 Dinosaurs Enter Pop Culture...............................................................23

Lecture 7 Dinosaur Origins ..................................................................................27

Lecture 8 In the Days of Dinosaurs .....................................................................31

Lecture 9 Dinosaur Diversity................................................................................35

Lecture 10 Dinosaurs Become Dynamic ...............................................................39

Lecture 11 Dinosaurs Become Airborne................................................................43

Lecture 12 Dinosaurs as Living Animals ...............................................................48

Lecture 13 T. REX Deconstructed and Reconstructed ...........................................52

Lecture 14 The Cretaceous Extinction Event ........................................................57

Course Materials ........................................................................................................62

Companion, three ecology field guides

poem written less than a century after the discovery of

bundle of bones was named APATOSAURUS before another bundle of bones

The Riddle of the Dinosaur

Source: The Edgar Rice Burroughs Library; http://www.erbzine.com/dan/t1.html

1. Why are dinosaurs often viewed as “evolutionary failures”?

Other Books of Interest

de Camp, L. Sprague, and Catherine Cook de Camp. The Day of the

The Dinosaur Corporation website Dinosaur Timeline Gallery features a col-

The Suggested Reading for this lecture is John R. Horner’s

inosaurs first evolved in the Mesozoic Era about 230

Horner, John R. Digging Dinosaurs. New York: Workman Publishing, 1988.

Other Books of Interest

The Suggested Reading for this lecture is Christopher McGowan’s

ossils of large extinct animals must have been found by

McGowan, Christopher. The Dragon Seekers: The Discovery of Dinosaurs

Other Books of Interest

Colbert, Edwin H. Dinosaurs: An Illustrated History. Maplewood, NJ:

1. The Linda Hall Library of Science, Engineering, and Technology website

ne way to become immortal, at least in a manner of speak-

1. How did Cope and Marsh become such bitter rivals?

Wallace, David Rains. The Bonehunters’ Revenge. Boston: Houghton

Other Books of Interest

The Suggested Reading for this lecture is Mark A. Norell, Eugene S.

he American Museum of Natural History, located at

sixty-five, he helped unearth a mammal-like reptile called LYSTROSAURUS from

Norell, Mark A., Eugene S. Gaffney, and Lowell Dingus. Discovering

Other Books of Interest

1. The American Museum of Natural History — http://www.amnh.org

Charles R. Knight” — http://www.charlesrknight.com/fmnh.htm

inosaurs have become very much a part of pop culture.

Other Books of Interest

Prehistoric Times. Published quarterly. 145 Bayline Circle, Folsom, CA 95630

The Dinosauricon is a website devoted to dinosaur information and illustration

inosaurs flourished (excluding birds, which still flourish)

dinosaurs and pterosaurs are in a general group called Ornithodires. This

Other Books of Interest

The Journal of Dinosaur Paleontology —

inosaurs were the dominant terrestrial animals for most of

1. Name and describe the three periods of the Mesozoic Era.

Other Books of Interest