Page 37 - Everything You Know About Dinosaurs is Wrong

It also depends how ‘big’ is measured. The gargantuan SPINOSAURUS holds the record for the longest theropod – it was over 15 metres from its snout to
the tip of its tail. That’s
3 metres longer than Sue!
SPINOSAURUS lived in and around water, like its relative SIAMOSAURUS, and ate fish with quick snaps of its jaws.
Working out exactly how massive dinosaurs were is a tricky business. Deciding how long dinosaurs were might seem easy, but hardly any dinosaur skeletons are found complete, so scientists have to make guesses about how many bones are missing and how they might fit together.
The weight of dinosaurs is even more complicated to work out! Some palaeontologists used to build little models of what they thought the dinosaurs might have looked like and put them in water to see how much water they displaced – like when you get in the bath and the water rises – to give them a clue
to how heavy they were.
15 M
Nowadays, scientists ‘build’ models of dinosaurs on computers, which include their guts and other soft, squishy bits to guess how much they might have weighed all together.
What’s important to remember is that dinosaurs, just like animals today, would have all been unique. One CAMARASAURUS might have been a bit bigger than usual, some a bit skinnier. One TALARURUS may have been a bit shorter, while some had longer legs . . .
Although TYRANNOSAURUS was pretty huge,
it certainly had some competition for the title of 'Biggest Predator', and working out who was actually the biggest is a pretty tricky thing to do!
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