Dinosaurs
Tap a card to dig it up Tyrannosaurus rex · Triceratops · Stegosaurus · Velociraptor · Brachiosaurus · Pterosaurs · Fossils · Dinosaur Feathers · The Great Change · Dinosaurs Alive Today. Nobody has ever seen a live Tyrannosaurus — everything here was worked out from stone.
Ages 7–10
What's inside
Tyrannosaurus rex — the champion biter
Picture an animal as long as a city bus with a head bigger than you are. That was Tyrannosaurus rex, and its skeleton is one of the best studied of any animal that ever lived. Almost everything we say about it comes from measuring real bones.
Triceratops — horns and a shield
Triceratops carried one of the biggest heads any land animal has ever grown. Two long brow horns, one short nose horn and a wide bony frill made it look armoured, and it walked on four solid legs. Its Greek name simply describes a face wearing three horns.
Stegosaurus — plates and tail spikes
Stegosaurus is easy to spot: a double row of big flat plates running down its back and four long spikes at the end of its tail. It was about as long as a small lorry and it kept its head low, close to the ferns. Everything interesting about it is on the outside.
Velociraptor — turkey-sized and feathered
Here is the biggest surprise in this whole world: the real Velociraptor would have come up to about your knee. It weighed roughly as much as a large turkey and it was covered in feathers. The huge scaly hunters in films borrowed its name and almost nothing else.
Brachiosaurus — a neck like a crane
Brachiosaurus is the one whose front legs are longer than its back legs, so its body slopes upwards like a giraffe's. That shape lifted its small head high above the treetops. Standing beside one, your head would not even reach its knee.
Pterosaurs — flyers, not dinosaurs
Pterosaurs are the winged animals that shared the sky above the dinosaurs — and here is the important bit: they are not dinosaurs. They belong to a separate branch of the family, close cousins rather than members. Calling one a dinosaur is like calling your cousin your brother.
Fossils — clues locked in rock
Every single thing in this world was worked out from fossils, so it is worth knowing how one is made. Almost no animal ever becomes a fossil; most are eaten, or rot, or blow away. The rare ones got covered quickly by mud or sand, and then had a very long wait.
Dinosaur Feathers — fuzz came before flight
For most of the last two hundred years, everybody drew dinosaurs bare and scaly. Then fossils came out of old lake beds in China with fuzz, fluff and proper feathers still visible around the bones. It turns out feathers are much older than flying.
The Great Change — what happened 66 million years ago
Sixty-six million years ago the world changed, and the giant dinosaurs stopped appearing in the rocks. This is not a scary story — it is a puzzle, and detectives have solved most of it. The clue that cracked it was a thin grey line of clay.
Dinosaurs Alive Today — birds are dinosaurs
Here is the ending nobody expects: dinosaurs are not all gone. Birds are not merely related to dinosaurs, they are dinosaurs, in the same way that a bat is a mammal. There is a dinosaur on your street right now, probably eating crumbs.
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