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    Dinosaurs
    Dinosaurs
    Dinosaurs
    Ebook220 pages1 hour

    Dinosaurs

    By Douglas Palmer

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    About this ebook

    An identification guide to the most important and best known dinosaurs

    Do you know the difference between a Coelophysis and a Diplodocus? How much larger than a human was a Spinosarus? Is it likely that the Parasaurolophus made a sound like a trombone? All these questions and many more are answered in Collins Gem Dinosaurs, a highly illustrated guide to the world's very wild life hundreds of millions of years ago.

    A fully illustrated guide to the lost world of dinosaurs, the book provides descriptions of the most significant features and habits of these fascinating prehistoric reptiles, with profiles of nearly 70 dinosaurs which include in-depth looks at how dinosaurs lived, from keeping warm to moving about.

    For each species information is given on

    o What they ate
    o How their size compares to ours
    o How they behaved
    o Where they lived

    The book also includes explanations of what the dinosaur names mean and how to pronounce them.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins UK
    Release dateDec 24, 2019
    ISBN9780007555277
    Dinosaurs

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      Book preview

      Dinosaurs - Douglas Palmer

      Cover page: Collins Gem Dinosaurs - Discover the facts behind the fictionCollins Gem logo

      Dinosaurs.

      Douglas Palmer.

      COPYRIGHT.

      HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

      1 London Bridge Street,.

      London SE1 9GF.

      WilliamCollinsBooks.com.

      First published in 2006.

      This edition published in 2014.

      Text © 2006 Douglas Palmer.

      Illustrations © 2006 HarperCollins Publishers.

      The author asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

      Illustrations by James Robins and Steve White (pages 10, 13, 18, 21, 23, 25, 27, 28, 31–33 only)

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

      HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.

      Source ISBN: 9780007222537.

      Ebook Edition © OCTOBER 2019 ISBN: 9780007555277.

      Version: 2019-11-29

      NOTE TO READERS.

      This ebook contains the following accessibility features which, if supported by your device, can be accessed via your e-reader/accessibility settings:

      Change of font size and line height.

      Change of background and font colours.

      Change of font.

      Change justification.

      Text to speech.

      How to use Collins Gem Dinosaurs.

      You may choose to read this ebook in a linear fashion, or to explore the information by using the easy-to-use navigation menus, which organise the dinosaurs by period and group.

      Note: A few of the dinosaurs detailed in this ebook belong to more than one period on the timeline. These dinosaurs have been categorised in the predominant period.

      CONTENTS.

      Cover.

      Title Page.

      Copyright.

      Note to Readers.

      INTRODUCTION.

      WHAT IS A DINOSAUR?.

      DINOSAUR APPEARANCES..

      DINOSAUR BEHAVIOUR..

      DINOSAUR DIETS..

      EGGS, NESTS AND BABIES..

      THE ARMS RACE..

      TRACKS AND TRAILS..

      THE DINOSAUR ERA..

      FOSSIL FORMATION..

      THE FIRST FINDS..

      DINOSAUR NAMES..

      ORIGINS AND EVOLUTION.

      THE DINOSAURS.

      GLOSSARY.

      WEBSITES AND FURTHER READING.

      INDEX.

      About the Publisher

      INTRODUCTION.

      To most people, the word dinosaur brings to mind an enormous animal of awesome strength and ferocity. The name dinosaur means ‘terrible lizard’, and thanks to a constant deluge of dinosaur images in popular media, these amazing extinct animals have become perhaps the most iconic creatures in history.

      What is less often apparent is the extraordinary diversity and variety of the dinosaurs. They were not all vast meat eaters and some resembled birds more closely than the reptiles we know today, with feathers rather than scaly skin. This introduction to dinosaur life portrays a selection of the dinosaurs we know most about, from the earliest ones, such as Eoraptor that lived around 228 million years ago, to the latest ones, such as Triceratops that became extinct 65 million years ago. We discover what they were like, where they lived, how they behaved, when they were first found and what the most recent discoveries tell us. Also included is information on what their names mean and how to pronounce them.

      The popularity of dinosaurs has boomed since the early decades of the 19th century, when fossils of these extinct prehistoric monsters were first discovered and portrayed as once living animals. Yet despite the efforts of dinosaur experts over the last 200 years, we still have just a small sample – some 600 different kinds (genera) – of the total range and diversity of these remarkable animals, which dominated life on land for the best part of 100 million years.

      As a result of this, many questions remain unanswered about how they lived, where they came from and how they were related to one another. For example, were the giant meat-eating theropods active hunters that chased down their prey, or were they scavengers who used their size to chase other meat eaters away from their kills? And did the giant plant-eating sauropods continue growing over a long period or did they grow faster than many of the large animals that are alive today? There is still much to be discovered, and who knows, maybe one day you will be the one to answer some of these questions.

      WHAT IS A DINOSAUR?.

      Since the early decades of the 19th century, fossil hunters have dug up hundreds of different kinds of ancient reptiles that we now know as dinosaurs. From tiny bird-sized creatures to the largest animals ever to have lived on land, the dinosaurs were an extraordinary group of animals. Ancient peoples populated their myths and legends with all sorts of strange monsters such as dragons. Today, the role of these creatures has been filled by the dinosaurs – real animals, many of which were just as strange as any fictional beast.

      Therizinosaurus

      Caption:

      Therizinosaurus, fantastic fiction or actual dinosaur?

      The dinosaurs first appeared around 230 million years ago and altogether form a special group of reptiles with certain distinct characters that were first recognized in the mid-19th century by the English anatomist Richard Owen. These features are preserved in the structure of their skeletons, especially their hip bones, and they separate dinosaurs from other reptiles both living and extinct. A number of extinct and distant reptile relatives of the dinosaurs, such as the flying pterosaurs and the sea-dwelling ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs, are often described as if they were dinosaurs, but this is not the case.

      Iguanodon

      Caption:

      Iguanodon, first described by Gideon Mantell.

      Ornithomimus

      Caption:

      Ornithomimus, a small and agile Ostrich-like dinosaur.

      Crocodile

      Caption:

      A crocodile, a living relative of the dinosaurs.

      The closest living relatives to the dinosaurs are the birds and crocodiles, with which they share certain features. All three groups share the presence of extra openings in the skull and jaw. With the birds they have in common lightly built bones, the bony structure of their legs, a hinged ankle, and aspects of the skull and jaws. And while the dinosaurs are also similar to crocodiles, they differ from them and other reptiles in the bone structure of their legs, feet and hips. Crocodiles, like most other living reptiles, sprawl with their limbs held out to the side of the body. However, the dinosaurs have their limbs tucked in under the body, a structure that allows them to walk and run more efficiently.

      The image and idea of dinosaurs as once living animals has changed enormously since their fossil remains were first discovered and recognized as belonging to a distinct group of extinct reptiles. Even the iconic status of the giant meat eaters like Tyrannosaurus rex has been partly displaced by that of small, fast-moving and highly active predators, some of which are known to have been covered with hairlike down and feathers.

      Archaeopteryx

      Caption:

      Archaeopteryx, a feathered dinosaur descendant.

      DINOSAUR APPEARANCES.

      Nobody has ever seen a live dinosaur, so our ideas about what exactly they looked like and how they behaved mostly have to come from our interpretation of their fossil record. Using living reptiles as a model for how dinosaurs might have looked led early investigators astray, because in many ways the dinosaurs were very different from crocodiles and lizards.

      Once it was realized that dinosaur skeletons were put together in a rather different way from those of any living animals, scientists had to go back to the basics of anatomy to try

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