Page 55 - Everything You Know About Dinosaurs is Wrong
P. 55
Some very inventive people once
even believed STEGOSAURUS used its plates as wings that let it glide through the air! But this idea never really got off the ground . . .
It’s easy to smirk at palaeontologists and their ideas from the distant past, but palaeontologists today can still make mistakes. At the end of the twentieth century, scientists were so excited to find dinosaurs with feathers, a dinosaur nicknamed ‘ARCHAEORAPTOR’ was announced to the world – but it was later discovered to be a fake. It was actually three dinosaurs and ancient birds stitched together!
Today, if you pick up some older books about dinosaurs, you still might see some of these mistakes in the pictures. And who knows? One day, you might even discover some mistakes in this book, as new discoveries about what dinosaurs looked like are being made all the time . . .
Some palaeontologists and palaeo-artists during the
last century thought that the super-tall sauropods, such as BRACHIOSAURUS, wouldn’t have been able to support their huge weight, so they must have lived in the water in order to float. Modern palaeontologists are sure this
is not correct, though, and that BRACHIOSAURUS and its relatives did indeed roam the land.
51