Page 54 - Everything You Know About Dinosaurs is Wrong

We’ve always known
what dinosaurs
looked like
50
Palaeontologists have been digging up fossils for hundreds of years but that doesn’t mean they have always known how those bones fitted together. It’s only by discovering more and more remains that scientists can be sure that their reconstructions are correct!
IGUANODON was first imagined to
be a rhinoceros-like animal, with a horn on the end of its nose (which
was later discovered to be a thumb spike). Only after more remains were uncovered were the animals more correctly reconstructed – although the ‘kangaroo’ pose that many museums then displayed the animals’ bones in was still wrong!
When the first sauropods were discovered,
some biologists tried to imagine how these huge animals could have walked – how did their
legs move under such great weight? But the biologists spent too long looking at lizards alive today. Living reptiles walk in a ‘sprawling’ style, which means their legs stick out to the sides
as they walk, and that’s how Gustav Tornier,
a German zoologist, drew them in his illustrations in 1910.
As more and more dinosaurs were discovered, palaeontologists started to realise that dinosaurs walked with their legs straight, underneath them – and that sauropods didn’t really drag their bellies on the floor!