There is some­thing com­pletely awe-inspiring about dinosaurs, even when you are an adult. Unlike Santa Claus and R-rated movies, it is some­thing from child­hood that con­tin­ues to be both mys­te­ri­ous and real— even though every­thing you learned when you were young were wrong. For exam­ple, I specif­i­cally mean the extinct non-avian dinosaurs, since  birds are tech­ni­cally dinosaurs as well (avian dinosaurs)

As part of Adven­tures of the Mind (like a TED for high school stu­dents) in Mon­tana, We spent the day with Jack Horner, the pale­on­tol­o­gist who was an inspi­ra­tion for Dr. Alan Grant in Juras­sic Park. Here is his TED talk on how to build a dinosaur from a chicken. (One of the dinosaur mod­els in the Museum of the Rock­ies actu­ally had feath­ers down his back. He looked totally fab­u­lous, like he should have been in the New York City gay pride parade.)

But again, every­thing we were told about dinoa­suars as kids is wrong. Here is a roundup of some of what we were told yes­ter­day, some fac­tual and some still mak­ing its way into sci­en­tific accep­tance. The bron­tosaurus doesn’t exist. Dinosaurs were warm blooded. Tricer­atops didn’t use their horns for fight­ing, and instead the trills and horns were per­haps the dino equiv­a­lent of plum­mage. The T Rex was prob­a­bly a scav­enger and not a preda­tor. The sauropods (aka bronto-like crea­tures) likely had their necks held hor­i­zon­tally rather than this upright giraffe approach.

So below is a tenon­tosaurus which died in agony in a velico­rap­tor pack attack. You can tell from scat­tered teeth (too many for an indi­vid­ual, indi­cat­ing a pack of rap­tors) and arched neck (an agony response that we still see in chick­ens today).

Of course, some dinosaurs were very much good par­ents. Below, a lam­beosaurine egg clutch, which was dis­cov­ered in 1993.

Did dinosaurs have part of their brains in their butts (or at least hip)? Sug­ges­tion from hip bones that per­haps some of their motor con­trol was in the bot­tom half of their body. That idea of a “chicken run­ning around with its head cut off” may actu­ally be telling.

The evi­dence is the Tyran­nosaurus Rex was scav­enger not preda­tor, said Jack Horner. This is not a very unpop­u­lar idea, given T Rex’s iden­tity as the “king of the dinosaurs.” Below is a famed T Rex found in highly artic­u­lated state.

We made it down­stairs to the col­lec­tions. When you enter, you find a huge table full of ran­dom fos­sils just wait­ing to be cleaned. It’s kinda weird to see it all jum­bled together.

And a small cadre of very dili­gent folks are clean­ing the dinosaur bones. This woman has been work­ing for months on a hadrosaur jawbone.

We got to go into the room full of cab­i­nets with the cleaned spec­i­mens. One of the best draw­ers is full of tyran­nosaurus teeth from B. Rex, at the Museum of the Rock­ies. Dinosaur teeth grow back, unlike humans. Those grooves are so the tooth under­neath can fit in.

Then we spent the after­noon look­ing for fos­sils at a ranch near Liv­ingston, Mon­tana, which was near the marine line dur­ing the Juras­sic era. Mon­tana is a pop­u­lar place for find­ing dinosaur fos­sils in large part because it has a lot of exposed land that dates back to the era when dinosaurs lived.

A lot of pale­on­tol­ogy involves going around look­ing in the dirt where you think dinosaurs might be, and pok­ing around. Here is the ranch.

They found a bunch of sauropods (a.k.a. bron­tosaurus like crea­tures)  in the area. Below is a cast of a femur they found there. Huge. The guy hold­ing is a grad stu­dent, Kerry, who admits he has a sauro­pod fetish, so much so that his gmail includes sauro­pod in it, though he is not sauropod@gmail, as some­one else appar­ently claimed it first. He also wears a belt with an apatosaurus on it.

Ran­dom pale­on­tol­o­gist tip. You can test if some­thing is bone, fos­sil or oth­er­wise, by putting it in your mouth to see see if it sticks to your tongue. Bone mat­ter sticks, but rock etc. does not. There are a lot of dinosaur hunters who have eaten a lot of dirt.

Below is a very anti­cli­matic exam­ple of a fos­sil Kerry found. It kinda looks like rock. I know. And it would be painful to extract it.

My favorite the­ory of the day. That the rea­son Euro­pean drag­ons and Chi­nese drag­ons may look dif­fer­ent is that Europe had ter­adactyls (bird like with wings) fos­sils and Chi­nese had sauro­pod fos­sils (long).

By the way, the Wikipedia entry for bron­tosaurus akes you to apatosaurus, try it your­self: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brontosaurus. The bron­tosaurus is a mix up of a apatosaurus body with the skull of another dinosaur (cama­rasaurus). I actu­ally think that bron­tosaurus deserves its own entry explain­ing how the mixup hap­pened, and show not sim­ply be a redirect.

Re the myth of bron­tosaurus. This is com­pletely dis­rup­tive for the Flint­stones, where they serve bron­to­burg­ers. Can you imag­ine apatoburgers?

Tags: dinosaurs, montana