Page 25 - Everything You Know About Dinosaurs is Wrong

Sometimes animals that are separated from the rest
of their species evolve, or change, into smaller versions of
their relatives, sometimes known as ‘dwarf’ species. This usually happens on islands, where there is less space to roam, fewer predators and less food to eat.
It looks like some dinosaurs were dwarf species too. By looking at fossilised bones and counting the number of ‘growth rings’ in them, palaeontologists can tell if dinosaurs were grown-ups or youngsters and it looks like these small dinosaurs were fully grown.
TETHYSHADROS was a hadrosaur,
a duck-billed dinosaur, discovered in modern-day Italy. It was only the size of a donkey (but with a longer tail).
MAGYAROSAURUS and EUROPASAURUS were dwarf sauropods. EUROPASAURUS probably lived on an island and so might not have needed to grow large to be protected from predators. MAGYAROSAURUS only grew to about 6 metres long which, for a sauropod, was tiny. After all, DIPLODOCUS was more like 26 metres long!
Although we now know that not all dinosaurs were giants, it makes sense that we know the most about all the big dinosaurs because the BIGGER a fossil is, the EASIER it is to find!
21
s
u
c
o
d
o
l
p
i
D
T
e
t
h
y
s
h
a
d
r
o
s
Magyarosaurus
s
u
r
u
a
s
a
p
o
r
u
E