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

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  (#13) All Mammals Lived In Fear Of Dinosaurs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Other scientists, such as Dr. Paul “PZ” Myers, associate professor of biology at the University of Minnesota Morris, believe this is is a nonsense theory with no proof whatsoever behind it. 
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  (#2) They Went Extinct From Eating Too Many Eggs

  According to an early 20th century paleontologist named George Wieland, the dinosaurs died off from eating too many eggs.

  No, this doesn’t mean they were all poisoned to death by bad egg salad. It means carnivorous dinosaurs ate so many fertilized dinosaur eggs from other species that dinosaurs as a whole went extinct. While there is some evidence that some dinosaurs did prey on eggs and even hatched baby dinosaurs, there’s no evidence it happened at such a extreme rate that it brought the whole species to its collective knees.

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