Dinosaurs!
You probably
won't be able to find a kid that's not the least bit interested in dinosaurs.
They lived
about 201 million years ago and for the most part went extinct about 66 million
years ago. That's almost 150 million years of global domination.
Even with
all the excitement, fossil evidence, and information out there about these
lovable and sometimes scary creatures, there's a whole lot of bunk.
Humans
lived along-side dinosaurs, right?
No, humans
did not live anywhere near the time of the dinosaurs.
This false
depiction is caused by something called the "Creation Museum." It's
commonly believed that evolutionary biologists are the ones making this claim
but its actually the complete opposite. Making false claims about humans
coexisting with dinosaurs is a way in which creationists rationalize the age of
the Earth with the age depicted in The Bible.
Although
humans weren't around, there were other mammals and tiny animals that lived
along-side dinosaurs.
Homo sapiens
have only been around for about 200,000 years and the human evolutionary split
from Hominidae to Hominini (our earliest human ancestors) happened about 6
million years ago. While early primates existed about 55 million years ago and
split to the Hominidae about 14 million years ago.
Not even
close.
We've only
been the dominant species for a couple hundred thousand years while the
dinosaurs ruled the planet for a couple hundred million years.
Did an
asteroid wipe out the dinosaurs?
Yes. There
is a lot of "de-bunkers" out their claiming that this is false,
however in very recent discovery scientists have been able to confirm that an
asteroid did in fact make the dinosaurs go extinct as well as some of the other
effects an asteroid impact causes that assisted their extinction as well. They
didn't have their own NASA. It's not that they were unsuccessful in
evolutionary terms, they were more successful than we have been so far, we have
got a long ways to go to win that race.
Did all of
the dinosaurs go extinct?
Birds
evolved approximately 150 million years ago from ancient dinosaurs and they
were the ones able to rebound the effects of the asteroid impact and they
continue to evolve into the species we know today that actually come from
dinosaurs. So when you see a bird, you're seeing back into the past of 150
million years of evolution.
Also flying
reptiles (not birds) went extinct with the dinosaurs but they weren't actually
dinosaurs technically just a close relative.
Do
archaeologists dig up dinosaur bones?
Archaeology
is a subdivision of Anthropology and only deals with humans and the last 3-4 million
years. Paleontology is a subdivision of geology and biology and explores
fossils spanning 3.5 billion years.
Did all
dinosaurs live at the same time?
Not all dinosaurs
lived at the same time. There was roughly 1,000 different species of dinosaurs
spanning 150 million years. Some evolved and went extinct and new species arose
all during that time. They all didn't live together. Birds have about 9,000 species
and those species behaved the same way so you're looking at roughly 10,000
different species that spanned 150 million years all at different times.
There are
several other species of prehistoric animals that weren't birds or dinosaurs.
Does
dinosaur mean "terrible lizard?"
It means
"fearfully- great lizard." Even Wikipedia lies sometimes.
Was the
T-Rex Elvis of the dinosaurs?
T-Rex
dinosaurs are usually depicted as the toughest dinosaur in the bunch, while
they weighed 10,000 pounds and were ferocious creatures, they had to chase down
really fast running vegetarian dinosaurs in order to actually eat anything. In
prehistoric times you had greater chances of survival if you were a vegetarian
than if you were a carnivore, a lot of T-Rex's had short life spans.
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