Dinosaur Myths

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Dinosaur Myths

As more is understood about dinosaurs, for the most part our perception of them has changed. But some myths have persisted thanks to depictions that made certain dinosaurs household names.

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The museum’s dinosaur experts, Dr. Susie Maidment and Professor Paul Barrett, reveal some of the common mistakes made about the ancient reptiles that once ruled the earth.

If you’re familiar with Dilophosaurus, a large, frilled, venom-spitting lizard might come to mind—at least that’s what Steven Spielberg’s 1993 film Jurassic Park would have you believe.

The frilled lizard (Chlamydosaurus kingii) appears to have inspired Jurassic Park’s Dilophosaurus © Matt from Melbourne, Australia/ Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

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Unlike many of the reptiles found in the famous park, Dilophosaurus lived during the Jurassic period. But despite a colorful portrayal, the dinosaur’s starring role was almost certainly artistic license.

It probably wasn’t poisonous to begin with. In many living venomous animals, there are distinct pits in the jaw that indicate how an animal might deliver a venomous surprise.

Susie says, “We have no evidence that Dilophosaurus or any dinosaur can produce venom.” He also had this ornament in the movie and we have no evidence of that either.

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The movie version of the dinosaur was also smaller, which is unusual given the movies’ usual strategy of making the beasts bigger for maximum effect. In real life, an adult Dilophosaurus would have reached about twenty feet in length, although it could be argued that the dinosaur in the movie was a juvenile.

But what the movie did get right was the presence of a primary weapon. This is a known feature of the genre, although its purpose is almost impossible to define.

Dilophosaurus had a bony crest on its head, although it is not known what this was for © Jaime A Headden/ Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0). Cropped image.

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“Possibly it was to attract a mate,” says Susie. “If we had a lot of specimens, we could see if the crest was a sex difference: males had crests and females didn’t, for example.

“But Dilophosaurus is a very old dinosaur from about 190 million years ago, and the rocks it came from aren’t prolific in producing fossils, so I hope we don’t have a lot of them.”

This bug may be nearly 25 years old, but large, featherless velociraptors remain firmly planted in many minds.

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Velociraptor would actually have been about the size of a turkey, and the movie star was actually more similar to the related theropod Deinonychus.

The Velociraptors in Jurassic Park were closer in size to Deinonychus. Models of these larger dinosaurs can be seen in the museum’s dinosaur gallery.

“The main thing that’s wrong these days is that they were naked. In 1993, this is what we thought Velociraptor and Deinonychus would look like. But starting in the mid-1990s, there have been a slew of feathered dinosaur discoveries.

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“It is quite certain that they would have been covered in feathers and may well have had long display type feathers on their forearms.

“Feathers may have evolved for thermoregulation, to keep them warm, because these animals may have been warm-blooded.”

Peter Jackson’s 2005 remake of King Kong features a fictional descendant of Tyrannosaurus rex named Vastatosaurus rex. The star, a 25-foot-tall gorilla, takes down the mighty carnivore with apparent ease. The reality (that is, if a giant gorilla existed) would likely have been very different.

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Paul explains that the bite force of the ‘Tyrannosaurus’ was about three times stronger than that of an African lion: it had the strongest bite of any animal ever measured. If the T. rex had wrapped its jaws around King Kong’s arm, he wouldn’t have an arm left, that was one crushing bite.

The large jaws and powerful bite of the Tyrannosaurus would have been more than a match for a giant gorilla.

Although it is suggested that it underwent 65 million years of isolated evolution on Skull Island, V. rex falls short of more than one misconception compared to its ancestors.

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Most theropods had three fingers on each hand, but there were several whose arms and hands were greatly reduced. Tyrannosaurus had two fingers for a hand, just like its fictional descendant.

Says Paulus: ‘We don’t know why the front legs were so reduced in T. rex. It may be that they were not used much to catch prey and were rudimentary structures that were gradually lost through evolution.’

Neave Parker is known for a number of dinosaur reconstructions from the 1960s, like this Tyrannosaurus illustration. They were based on scientific experience at the time, but are now known to contain many inaccuracies. Discover more Neave Parker dinosaurs.

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“Lots of dinosaurs have this problem. You often see them as piano players. But when you really look at the hands and how they work, their palms would actually be facing each other.”

“They couldn’t turn their hands down. No meat-eating dinosaur we know of could do that, so they could clap their hands, but they weren’t piano players.”

But these giants were actually lost about 25 million years. Where T. rex lived in the late Cretaceous, it was the only very large carnivore, so it would never have faced an opponent of its size.

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Spinosaurus was the largest carnivore that ever lived. Although studying this dinosaur is challenging due to a lack of fossils, scientists believe it carved out a niche for itself by eating primarily fish and spending most of its time in the water.

This is a Baryonyx skeleton. This dinosaur was a spinosaurid and was related to Spinosaurus, with a skull similar to that of a crocodile.

Susie says: ‘In the UK we have Baryonyx, which is a relative of Spinosaurus. If you removed the upper jaw and looked at the nose, it’s sort of a rosette shape. It is very characteristic of fish-eating animals, both now and in the past.

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Ancient marine reptiles (such as ichthyosaurs and pliosaurs) and modern crocodiles also have this distinctive jaw shape. Fossilized stomach contents of Baryonyx containing fish scales have also been found.

“It supports the theory that it was a fish-eating dinosaur. However, it not only ate fish, but they also found young Iguanodon bones in its stomach.”

Baryonyx and its cousin Spinosaurus may have supplemented their diets with other dinosaurs, but probably not anything as big as Tyrannosaurus.

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“In the first Jurassic Park, a Tyrannosaurus chases a speeding jeep. People have observed the running speeds of dinosaurs, and recent research suggests that T. rex could barely outrun a human,” says Susie.

T. rex likely had a top speed of only around 10 miles per hour, but the dinosaurs it despaired of wouldn’t have moved much faster, either.

“Triceratops and hadrosaurs probably weren’t very fast either. So if Tyrannosaurus was a hunting predator, then everything happened much more slowly in the Mesozoic than it did in today’s Serengeti.

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Tyrannosaurus was probably a skilled, albeit slow, hunter. But theories of a strictly purifying nature persist.

“It’s really hard to distinguish behavior from the fossil record. But if you look at modern ecosystems, you’ll notice that if a lion sees a carcass, he won’t miss an opportunity to eat.”

“I think it’s a false dichotomy that T. rex was just a hunter and not a scavenger, or just a scavenger and not a hunter. Things hunting also clear. There are very few animals that alone are enough.

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Says Paul: ‘For almost everything we do with dinosaurs, we use comparisons to living creatures as a reference.

“To get a measure of the intelligence of any extinct animal, we use the endocast, which is the cast left in the skull that would have been occupied except for the brain. You compare the volume of the brain with the mass of the animal.

This is a reconstruction of a Stegosaurus by artist Neave Parker. We now know that dinosaurs did not drag their tails along the ground.

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“Most dinosaurs align with modern reptiles or birds: their brains are the expected size for their body size. But there are exceptions like Troodon, which had a much larger brain than we would have expected for bodies of its size. It looks like this little dinosaur was pretty smart.

Stegosaurus was a medium-sized thyreophore (armored dinosaur), weighing around 2,000 kilograms as an adult. Its brain was particularly small, so when an enlarged section of the spine was noticed in the sacral (hip) region, it was theorized that it had harbored a second brain.

“The spine tends to get larger in a lot of dinosaurs, but for some reason it was noticeable early on in Stegosaurus,” says Susie.

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“There were theories that his forebrain was not powerful enough to coordinate

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