Dinosaur Egg Discovery Gives Rare Insight To Unknown Beast Dinosaurs Inside Out

when dinosaur fossils were first pulled from the ground the appearance of the creatures was anyone's guess and how they lived was beyond comprehension but from Argentina to Wyoming great discoveries and bold new thinking suggest these ancient creatures were faster more agile and more complex than once imagined 65 million years after the last dinosaurs vanished they're more popular than ever they've escaped from museums and invaded our popular culture spawning Renaissance of the dinosaurs for over 150 million years group of animals unlike any today ruled our planet the dinosaurs their great success demands that we understand them but their remains are silent today scientists like Jack her are struggling to find what they were really like Herer is one of the paleontologists responsible for redefining our modern image of dinosaurs his groundbreaking discoveries and Keen insights have helped answer questions that have lingered for more than 100 years his Pioneer status attracts volunteers from all over the United States to for his crash course in dinosaur excavation the students live in traditional Native American tepees designed to withstand howling winds that sweep off the nearby Rocky Mountains Herer believes that the focus of paleontology is changing know by tonight it's instead of settling for knowing what dinosaurs look like we now now need to know how they lived in the old days people were looking for display pieces they were looking for things to put in museum so they would go out they would find dinosaur they were looking for individual dinosaurs and they were looking for something big so they'd go out they'd find dinosaur they'd dig it up they'd bring it back they'd prepare it they'd put it on display and then they'd go look for another one and they they weren't doing they weren't doing science they were mean it was it was more in line with sort of the PT Barnum Spirit nowadays most of us think are are very interested in how dinosaurs live in the 1970s her's research led him to the debate over the link between dinosaurs and birds an issue that's nagged paleontologists almost since the beginning of the science as early as 1839 dinosaurs were CL classified as reptiles even though some had hip bones like modern birds not much was made of the similarity until 1861 when an astonishing fossil was pulled from German Quarry named archaeopteris it looked like small dinosaur but with one major difference it had feathers some scientists would later declare it the missing link between birds and dinosaurs but others refuted the idea because it lacked the specialized collar bone wishbone considered to be the fundamental trait of birds and their ancestors the dinosaur bird Theory gathered academic dust for 100 years in 1978 her found some hard evidence to all but resolve it chance encounter in Montana Rock Shop led him to the discovery of lifetime her and colleague were in their first year as excavators when they stopped at small fossil shop in Bina Montana not far from the Canadian border the owners were delighted when Herer was able to identify some of the fossils on display the bones that she had found turned out to be large duck bill dinosaur and as was leaving the shop she said by the way there are couple little bones here would like you to look at and she pulled out two tiny little bones both of which immediately recognized as baby Duckville dinosaur bones Herer was astonished he knew how incredibly rare baby dinosaur bones were and how much could be learned by finding more the shop owners agreed to close up early and take the dinosaur hunters to where the bones had been found in pasture lands just east of the Rocky Mountains they showed horn The Source it would become the Wellspring from which most of his future research would flow he proceeded to uncover numerous bones of baby dinosaurs buried in bow-shaped depression that he determined was nest it was historic find the first nest of baby dinosaurs ever discovered what's more that bones belong to previously unknown kind of duck bill dinosaur nearby he discovered hundreds more b-shaped depressions and realized that he'd found an entire nesting area many of them held fossilized eggs he called the new site egg Mountain only once before had dinosaur eggs and nests of this scale been found found in 1923 the American Museum of Natural History in New York sent the flamboyant Roy chapen Andrews on lavish expedition to the GOI desert in Mongolia the Expedition found total of 50 eggs individually and in nests they wrapped their Treasures in camel hair and loaded them in crates to carry home herner's find was even more impressive it yielded eggs babies and for the first time actual dinosaur embryos inside their eggs 70 to 80 million years after they were formed the discoveries gave him the chance to study the development of dinosaurs from embryo to hatchling to adult much of his research focused on one question After Dinosaurs is hatched that they act more like birds or like reptiles reptiles emerge from the egg with strong legs and are able to fend for themselves right away but hatchling birds are too weak to care for themselves parent must remain at the nest feeding them until they can stand on their own significant behavioral difference Horner suspected that at least some dinosaurs cared for their young as birds do he looked for evidence in the eggs and the bones of the baby dinosaurs the eggs were deposited in clusters and it often takes Brute Force to free them from the surrounding Rock more delicate touch is used to scrape away the the finer particles finally the specimens are wrapped in burlap and plaster to be transported back to the museum for further study in the lab Herer and his colleagues began experiments to determine if baby dinosaurs could stand on their own when they emerged from their eggs they needed to look at the structure of the hatchlings leg book bones strong bones meant they could stand on their own and leave the nest like reptiles weak bones would suggest more helpless birdlike Behavior could discovery combined with Ingenuity bring us closer to understanding dinosaurs it has before every Discovery advances our knowledge of what the dinosaurs were really like and it goes beyond science the more dinosaur experts learn about these bizarre creatures the more fascinating they become to the public throughout the world hundreds of museums display thousands of dinosaur fossils to satisfy the growing interest and if people can't get to the museum the museum can sometimes come to them dinest International is an annual exhibition of dinosaurs and ancient life from around the world in 1996 in two-e period nearly 200,000 people flocked to see prehistory come alive they were joined by world-renowned dinosaur experts artists and merchandisers dest was the brainchild of paleontologist Don Walberg at the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences we have dinosaurs for the first time put in one place from every continent so there are people interested in the wonderful animals from China dinosaurs from Canada US of course T-Rex is extremely popular and unpopular scares some kids scaring kids and adults alike are the recent Jurassic Park movies which have tallied the highest box office receipts of all time but perhaps the most stunning example of the Public's soaring fascination with Dinosaurs was seen at sues in 1997 the New York auction house put sue the most complete T-rex skeleton yet found on the Block at $700,000 nting at 7 $800,000 8 $900,000 neing at 9 at $900,000 neing at9 at $900,000 now two bids at $1 million at $1 million now biding $1 million now 1.1 million 5.4 million telephone up front 5.5 5.6 5.7 three places 5.7 is in the center of the room still it's up front then at 7 7,600,000 fair warning then 7,600,000 up here 7,600,000 the highest bidder was the field museum in Chicago for single specimen it spent $7.6 million it was the most ever paid for dinosaur it seems that 65 million years after their Extinction dinosaurs are Conquering the Earth again today what remains of these once flourishing creatures is enough to draw huge crowds and excite the imaginations of scientists and the public Alik if were dinosaur which dinosaur would want to be the biggest one if was dinosaur think would have going to be Tyrannosaurus Rex think I'd like to be turtle and watch Dinosaurs the tri the Triceratops brosaurus maybe rats for me they were the hook that captured me in the career in science and among the topics care about are dinosaur extinction how they lived what they ate recreating worlds of the ancient past dest is just one of the latest events that brings the dinosaurs world back to life for over century scientists have displayed their discoveries to admiring public even as they struggled to understand what these creatures were really like from the first meager discoveries the first public display of dinosaurs was in 1854 it occurred at Crystal Palace Park just outside of London some 40,000 people came to see life-sized sculptures of long vanished creatures on the banks of man-made lake stood replicas of many ancient animals and on Islands lur the most popular sculptures by far the dinosaurs huge and hulking for the first time ever scientists had collaborated with artists to put Flesh on their bones each reconstruction represented the best that science had to offer it was thrilling and bit strange to public just getting used to the concept of Extinction recreating three-dimensional sculptures from the bones of extinct animals had been tremendous undertaking English sculptor Benjamin Hawkins was hired to build the creatures under the supervision of scientists but very few dinosaur bones have been found by 1853 so the sculptures required some educated guesswork Hawkins used mix of creatures as his models lizards crocodiles and rhinoceros he labored for years on the project as it neared completion he held an unusual dinner party distinguished guests were served inside the belly of An Unfinished dinosaur model Hawkins had good reason to celebrate the Crystal Palace exhibition became the crowning Glory of new science that was just beginning to understand dinosaurs Through the Ages people had probably always come across dinosaur fossils but had no idea what they were in the 3r century ad dinosaur bones discovered in China were thought to be the remains of dragons ancient Greeks believe they were from race of giants it wasn't until the 18th century that Europeans on the brink of the Industrial Revolution started to qu question what the strange bones found in their minds and quaries were all about when the first bones were found the idea of Extinction and the age of the Earth were virtually unknown no one understood where the bones could have come from or how old they were but the work of few leading scientists would soon provide an explanation in 1799 French anatomist George kuier began comparing the newly discovered bones to those of living creatures he noted similarities and declared the bones were very old and the animals they came from no longer existed it was radical idea that launched the science of paleontology the study of ancient life in 1818 Oxford Professor William buckin applied kier's ideas to partial skeleton he found in an English Quarry he noted the similarity to Bones of modern reptiles and named this new creature Megalosaurus or great lizard 5 years later English Dr Gideon mantel found huge jaw the teeth resembl those of an iguana so he called the creature Iguanodon as more discoveries came to light english anatomist Richard Owen in 1841 published paper in which he classified these new creatures in single group called dinosa meaning terrible lizards from then on they would be known as the dinosaurs later Owen would supervise Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins as he recreated the new discoveries at Crystal Palace they were works of tremendous imagination but were based unlimited information and riddled with inaccuracies Megalosaurus was shown as merely scaled up version of generic reptile ambling on four legs now we know it stood upright swift two-legged Predator like T-Rex Iguanodon was also shown as four-legged Behemoth with spike on its nose today we know Iguanodon ran on two legs the horn on its snout was actually defensive Spike protruding from its thumb the sculptures more fanciful than real created an image of dinosaurs as giant lumbering lizards but the creators of the Crystal Palace exhibition did the best they could with the little information they had in the following decade the picture of dinosaurs would begin to change across the Atlantic knowledge of dinosaurs grew with the discovery of more fossils as settlers flooded the American West in the 1870s fossils began turning up in the exposed sediments of the dry and Barren regions called lands soon museums in the East sent Prospectors to Wyoming and Montana to hunt dinosaurs they came back with new and far more complete specimens than any found before as the diggers brought in one new kind of dinosaur after another scientists VI to classify and name them the work became an obsession for paleontologist ail Marsh of Yale and Edward Drinker cop of The Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia both were extremely ambitious and both were after the same thing to outdo each other by discovering and identifying the most dinosaurs their bitter competition took many forms in 186 Marsh pointed out that COPE in scientific journal had put the head of the giant sea reptile elasmosaurus on the wrong end mortified by his mistake and raged at Marsh cope tried to buy back all copies of the journal before they reached his peers when new fossil bed was uncovered in 1877 at KOMO Bluff Wyoming both cop and Marsh sent Crews to stake their claim rival Prospectors were said to engage in fist fights even smashing fossils in the opposing camp on One Expedition Marsh hired two Army Scouts as escorts one of them was William Cody better known as Buffalo Bill as thorny as it was the competition between cop Marsh and other dinosaur hunters produced huge Trove of fossils they uncovered many new species producing great leap in our knowledge of dinosaurs soon others would head West to dig up prehistory one of these Pioneers was Barnum Brown of the American Museum of Natural History in New York in 1902 he discovered the bones and teeth of giant carnivore he sent his treasure back to the museum for study so impressive were the bones that director Henry Fairfield Osborne dubbed the frightening new Predator Tyrannosaurus Rex the Tyrant Lizard King beginning in 1897 the public image of the new discoveries was shaped by artist Charles Knight originally hired by cop and Osborne to portray dinosaurs in scientific journals Knight was soon mission to paint reconstructions of the beasts for magazines and museums early in his career cop and Osborne asked him to paint and sculpt their dinosaurs as agile and active running jumping and fighting quite change from the Crystal Palace dinosaurs by the 1920s the idea of dinosaurs as quick and dynamic caught Hollywood's imagination as is seen in the Lost World in 1925 the depiction though Loosely based on scientific theory was probably chosen more for its thrilled potential by the 1940s for some unknown reason science had returned to its previous View of dinosaurs as slow-moving coldblooded and dimwitted Knight reflected this view in 1942 when he wrote and Illustrated an article for National Geographic magazine he described the dinosaurs as harmless and stupid and showed them lumbering across the landscape dragging their tails or wallowing in swamps soon pop culture would Embrace that image moronic plotting dinosaurs began turning up around every corner but in the last 20 years our knowledge has soared with bounty of new fossils in the 1960s fresh crop of paleontologists was making new discoveries and reexamining old assumptions what they found LED them question the notion of dinosaurs as lumbering beasts blazing the path was Brash young paleontologist named Bob Boger in 1969 he began arguing that although dinosaurs shared some features of slow-moving coldblooded reptiles anatomically they looked more like agile warm-blooded animals nearly 30 years later he continues to find evidence to support his ideas like this trackway in Central Wyoming where herd of dinosaurs once crossed mud flat their tracks are now preserved in stone this is the front paw of great 10 ton brontosaur squishing in and pushing up the mud as it walked no claw print the thumb would be there great big claw held off the ground and behind it the much larger hindpaw carrying three times as much weight with three claws one two three all chisel edged facing outwards and there are probably several hundred of these guys all walking the same direction these tracks go 100 yard that way 50 yard that way this was one big herd adults and babies Chriss cross saying the trackways of the brontosaur herd are meat eating dinosaurus some little ones Maybe This Tall roughly the weight of coyote and some taller roughly the weight of big mountain line three 400 lb what they were doing don't know but some of them were moving pretty fast some of them were going round back the brontosaur herd some cutting in the front probably trying to keep out of the way maybe looking for the small fry stirred up by these this enormous weight of Unstoppable herbivores from the spacing of their prince Bacher has determined the meat eating dinosaurs were as fast and agile as mammals there's simple equation that lets you calculate how fast these dinos were going if you know how tall they were were and how long the stride was now this meat eater is about as tall as was look at this can barely do that can't walk comfortably with that stride this guy was running he was going about 14 an hour some of the tracks that have been found nearby indicate speeds of up to 40 mph in spurts and the average speed of all these meat eaters is 7 an hour that's good clip that's the clip that coyotes and wolves and hunting dogs and hyenas use when they're scaring around looking for food that's Hot Blooded Pace in 1986 Bacher presented his radical ideas to the public and his book The Dinosaur heresies in it he Illustrated his theories with his own drawings showing how the anatomy of the dinosaurs made them faster and more agile than reptiles it was groundbreaking and controversial but slowly won over many of his critics he believes past Notions about dinosaurs are the result of scientists trying to fill in the missing pieces of complex puzzle this is wonderful head this is head of kind of brontosaur this is the head that was on brontosaurus itself in all the big movies King Kong the original lost world 1925 this head is powerful head it's got these huge teeth here for crushing plants and leaves big nostril for hooting pretty big eye to wonderful head and when grew up and the Brontosaurus skeleton in New York this wonderful skeleton from Wyoming this head was on it it's wonderful head but it's the wrong head how did early dinosaur experts put the wrong head on the brontosaur when big dinosaurs died their remains were often torn apart by scavengers or scattered by floods add millions of years on shifting Earth and it's easy to see why heads and bodies often went their separate ways so it's very rare to find head and then neck and then torso and tail usually find mixed up parts the first brosaurus didn't have head but there was big head from another Quarry nearby take the body body from quarry the head from Quarry put them together made sense they fit pretty good it was dead wrong but as more fossils were discovered scientists realized their mistake and replace brontosaurus heads in their museums Baker's hunting ground is Kom Bluff in Central Wyoming he returns every summer to search for more dinosaur relics he's joined by groups of graduate students hoping to make their Mark in the field they'll likely have little to show after long day in the blistering heat it's the possibilities that drive them on the chance to discover completely new dinosaur or complete skull or skeleton if they're lucky their finds will add to the continuing wealth of fossils that began in the early 1800s as the evidence accumulates new theories are formed old ones discarded from sluggish behemoths to fleet-footed Upright Racers from coldblooded to warm-blooded dinosaurs continue to Fascinate as our picture of them becomes clear while Bacher was redefining our ideas about the creatures Jack Herer was in his lab solving the most compelling dinosaur mystery of all at egg mountain in Montana jacko's dinosaur eggs provided an opportunity to test whether dinosaurs were birdlike or reptilian he took his treasure to the Museum of the Rockies in Boseman and devised an experiment the answer to his question was written on the bones of the dinosaur hatchlings if the leg bones were weak the baby dinosaurs would need parental help indicating birdlike Behavior but before measuring the strength of the bones Herer needed to determine which of his specimens were embryos and which were just hatched computer enabled him to visualize the largest embryo that could fit inside the egg any that couldn't fit must have been hatchlings once he identified hatchling leg bone he cut thin cross-section of it from its microscopic structure he could determine if it would have been strong enough to Bear the creature's weight he concluded these baby dinosaurs were too weak to stand on their own they depended on their parents to care for them bird-like Behavior never heard of in dinosaurs before he appropriately named the new dinosaur measur The Good Mother lizard with his new knowledge about measur Behavior her headed back to egg Mountain after years of digging he concluded that 80 million years ago the surrounding area was giant dinosaur Nursery adult neosaurs must have shuttled back and forth to feed their young it would have been as crowded as the nesting colonies of many seabirds today we know they nested in colonies and some of the nests that we have looks as though the the nests were 25 about the length of an average adult apart from one another which is similar to birds from his study of nearby cimt Herer believes egg Mountain was once an ancient Island surrounded by Shallow Lake which helped protect the babies from predators dinosaurs may have waited out to the island to lay eggs and tend to the young until they were strong enough to leave through the accumulation of fossils and the shrewd analysis of paleontologists such as Herer and Bacher the uniqueness and diversity of the dinosaurs is becoming ever clearer they were birdlike without being Birds reptilian without being reptiles the question remains when did these these Innovations begin the answer May lie in the Valley of the Moon today 65 million years after the last dinosaurs disappeared their fossilized bones are being Unearthed though the rocks are slow to give up their Treasures scientists have discovered over 330 members of the dinosaur clan on average new type of dinosaur is named every 7 weeks at the foot of the Andes Mountains in Argentina lies rugged Barren landscape known as ishigo in English the Valley of the Moon 230 million years ago this was dense and Shady Forest stalking through it were small but menacing creatures the first known dinosaurs buried here along with their bones is the secret of their dominance isolated in the desolate beauty of this Barren Argentine landscape team of dinosaur hunters hopes to unlock the mysteries of dinosaur evolution ishi colaso the Valley of the Moon is one of the most productive fossil quaries in the world erosion caused by wind and rain combined with seasonally dry climate have exposed layers of sediment dating back almost 300 million years from central Camp 80 mi from the nearest town the team led by American paleontologist William sill of the University of San Juan in Argentina makes daily expeditions to other parts of this 105,000 acre region Sil has explored this Valley for 25 years it's one of the best places in the world to study the roots of dinosaur evolution and understand what made dinosaurs unique among the other creatures that shared the planet this Valley is just about the only place in the world where you have complete sequence of sediments that have fossils in them and that show the story of the origin of the dinosaurs and that's that's very rare very hard to find descending through one of the Valley's many Canyons Sil and his colleagues go back millions of years each layer of sediment that surrounds them was laid down at different point in the Earth's history to understand why the dinosaurs Rose to dominance they must go back to sediment some 230 million years old it's the first of three geologic periods in which the dinosaurs lived known as the Triassic it lasted from 248 to 25 million years ago the middle period is the Jurassic from 205 5 to 144 million years ago it was dominated by the largest known Dinosaurs the sods the last period was the Cretaceous beginning 144 million years ago it gave rise to Tyrannosaurus Rex triceratops and Velociraptor then 65 million years ago the Cretaceous ended and the dinosaurs mysteriously vanished dinosaurs were already becoming the dominant species by the middle of the Triassic to discover the world as it existed when they first appeared digs in sediments just before that time the dominant creatures of this earlier period were reptiles that had begun to acquire some features of modern-day mammals in the Valley of the Moon one of the most common of these mammal-like reptiles was the codon this is the skull of codon one of the mamalik reptiles very common here Pro possibly an omnivore probably vegetarian when you look at the skull this this is how we find them and it doesn't look like much at first but if you look closely you can see the outline of the eyes here the snout down here and back here the large temporal openings where the muscles that pull the jaw together came up through and here's actually part of the lower jaw sticking up through this opening now these were on the line to mammals they have some of the characteristics of mammals mammal-like reptiles sprawled low to the ground like reptiles with larger brains and complex teeth like mammals they seem to be well on their way to becoming the dominant animals that mammals are today but then their future was jeopardized to find out how takes his expedition higher up the Eastern Slope at ishigo the Red Cliffs hold sediments from the final years of the Triassic period here mamalik reptile fossils are almost non-existent in their place are the bones of new kind of creature the dinosaur what happened part of the answer comes from one of the earliest dinosaurs found here herrerasaurus dating from 225 million years ago it had all the tool TOS necessary to trounce its Rivals the mammal likee reptiles it was 10t long 500lb meater most remarkable were its legs its unique knee and hip joints allowed it to move on two feet bipedal stance that gave it the agility and speed to surpass the low slung mamalik reptiles it also freed up its forelimbs he was bipedal so his for liim Ms were used for grasping raking tearing apart the prey in addition to its large claws the skull and Teeth of herrerasaurus made it formidable Predator the things that make him good dinosaur are these big teeth with serated edges like steak knife and of course the major feature is this secondary jaw joint right here at sliding jaw joint that allows the tooth bearing part of the lower jaw to open independently of the rest of the lower jaw that opens from back here this would have increased the gape of the animal by about 30° and allowed him to manipulate prey up front while still holding tight to it from with the rear of the jaw puncture wounds and the skull of herrerasaurus are Battle Scars apparently from fight with one of its own from the the size of the tooth marks on his skull here we can see one or two of them puncture wounds there's another puncture wound down here from the size of these it looks like it was the same Critter they may have been fighting over killed prey at the time it was discovered herrerasaurus was the most primitive dinosaur ever found but since it had already developed features similar to later me eating dinosaurs it couldn't have been the first instead it was believed to have been very early stage in the evolution of carnivorous dinosaurs like Tyrannosaurus Rex the search continued for an even more primitive dinosaur in October 1991 one of Sill's graduate students Ricardo Martinez found one his team uncovered the bones of dinosaur roughly 3 feet long barely the size of dog it was found in sediments 228 million years old practically the dawn of the dinosaur age it was named Eoraptor the dawn stealer since then Sill's group has found six more this is skull of eel Raptor tremendously important in the history of dinosaurs because the teeth of this shows that it is carnivorous dinosaur the high narrow skull the large orbits tell us that it was an active predator and one of the the great things that tells us of its possible ancestor of all the carnivorous dinosaurs is this incipient jaw joint the second joint that allows it to manipulate prey and that's major characteristic of all of the later carnivorous dinosaurs but it also contains the Primitive features in the pallet it still has the old primitive teeth so here we have what consider to be an ideal ancestor for the later carnivorous dinosaurs living just before herrerasaurus Eoraptor had similar features including bipedal stance and serrated teeth but its sliding jaw joint was much less developed even so Sil believes it was menacing Predator that could overpower the mammal likee reptiles he was fast he was agile and he was probably very vicious judging from Modern crocodiles and birds even you know have You' seen rooster or if you can imagine an ostrich who is vicious Predator with big teeth and Claws instead of wings chasing down pig or some other animal across the plains that's probably as close as we can come to visualizing Eoraptor as predator EO Raptor's features were similar to those of herrerasaurus but more primitive double-jointed Jaws serrated teeth and an agile stance were too much for the slower bigger brained mammal-like reptiles to compete with by the end of the Triassic Peri period dinosaurs had replaced them as the dominant animals the dinosaurs were faster were more agile and were tremendous Predators at this in this case it's question of being fast or being smart and the smart guys lost Sil also discovered that the early meat eaters had already developed hollow bones trait shared by modern Birds they were Swift light bipedal killers they cleared the path allowing later dinosaurs to diversify grow exponentially in size and outcompete all other animals on land this image of dinosaurs is far removed from the picture of them as oversized reptiles first put forward at London's Crystal Palace Park in 1854 science wants pigeonhole dinosaurs as reptiles but today we're seeing they shared features with birds and mammals too they also had their own traits unmatched by any living animals our growing knowledge of dinosaur behavior is now making it possible to bring these creatures back alive generations of dinosaur science scientists have seen their discoveries transformed into public attractions that bring ancient worlds back to life today's version is theme park being created by Walt Disney imagineering engineers and artists are taking everything we currently know about dinosaurs and making them almost as real as they were 100 million years ago found new according to science liaison Casey Brena the job still leaves room for interpretation one of the challenges of recreating an extinct species which we only have bones to work with today is interpreting what their body motions skin colors and behavior will be and we find that utilizing of course nature as it exists today and with the new knowledge that probably birds are are related to dinosaurs if they aren't actually dinosaurs has given artists lots of of inspiration in how dinosaurs would look how they would act and behave like their counterparts 150 years ago dinosaur artists mix scientific fact with fiction but today they have more science to work with scientists have found impressions of dinosaur skin but no clues as to color for long time artists picture them dull gray since it's now believed that dinosaurs are related to birds artists feel free to use more vibrant colors Disney's robotic styracosaurus relative of Triceratops has also gained from the new paleontology it was once perceived as lumbering animal with huge head stiffly mounted on its body and front legs sped to the side like lizards recent studies show that its head was connected with limber ball and socket joint the animal's neck muscles could toss the head in any direction though we're getting closer to knowing how dinosaurs lived moved and acted we're still long way from knowing everything about them but we're on the right track 19th century scientists greatly expanded dinosaur science more recently men like Jack her and Robert Bacher have done the same inevitably the discoveries and theories of today will be disputed in the future but one of the new ideas is not likely to change that far from being giant reptiles dinosaurs were among the most complex diverse and successful creatures that ever existed