20 Dinosaur Facts You Can Drop in a Conversation

Most dinosaur "facts" online are recycled from the same list. Here are twenty that are short enough to remember and specific enough to check.

1. Birds are dinosaurs. In the standard classification, birds are the only dinosaur group that survived the end-Cretaceous extinction.
2. The asteroid impact that ended the Cretaceous hit what is now the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico, at a site called Chicxulub.
3. Tyrannosaurus rex lived closer in time to humans than to Stegosaurus.
4. Stegosaurus had a brain roughly the size of a walnut relative to its body — but brain-to-body ratios are a poor guide to behaviour.
5. Triceratops and T. rex were contemporaries in what is now western North America.
6. Dinosaur means "terrible lizard", a name coined by Richard Owen in 1842.
7. The largest known dinosaurs were sauropods; Argentinosaurus and Patagotitan are among the heaviest candidates.
8. Feathers appear in the fossil record before flight did — several non-flying dinosaurs had them.
9. Velociraptor was about the size of a turkey, not the size of the film version.
10. Many dinosaurs were likely warm-blooded or somewhere between warm and cold-blooded; the debate is not settled for every group.
11. Pterosaurs were not dinosaurs. They were flying reptiles that lived alongside them.
12. Mosasaurs, plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs were also not dinosaurs; they were marine reptiles.
13. Dinosaur eggs were laid in clutches, and some species built nest mounds.
14. Fossil evidence shows some dinosaurs cared for their young after hatching.
15. The word "dinosaur" covers two main branches: Saurischia and Ornithischia.
16. Non-avian dinosaurs went extinct about 66 million years ago.
17. The Chicxulub impact was not the only factor; volcanic activity in what is now India was also changing the climate around that time.
18. A dinosaur's age is measured in millions of years, not in "eras of the Earth" — the Mesozoic is the era, the Cretaceous is the period.
19. Fossilised footprints tell us more about how dinosaurs moved than bones alone do.
20. New dinosaur species are still described every year, often from partial skeletons.

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