This Is Why Dinosaurs Looked Nothing Like in Movies

Meet a distant relative of a velociraptor. Look at those fangs! They could easily pierce the scaly armor of any other dinosaur. This dinosaur's peculiar backbone lets it move on four legs pretty fast. Wait a second. I guess I mixed it up. This is actually a skeleton of a regular mouse. But hold on, hold on. Don't turn this video off quite yet. Because the velociraptor I just showed you has nothing to do with dinosaurs either. It's a figment of Steven Spielberg's imagination, translated into reality by the Jurassic Park movie crew. So how did dinosaurs really look? Why were the first fossils reburied? Why would scientists break the bones of dinosaurs? And who's hiding from us the truth about them? I'm Vivica Williams and welcome to Riddle. Our primary source of knowledge about dinosaurs is bone remains, rare paw prints, and fossilized pieces of skin. From these fragments, you can create anything, not solely the image of the dinosaur that we're used to seeing now. Especially if your knowledge of paleontology got stuck somewhere in the 17th century. Because that was when, in 1677, the first dinosaur bone was found by Robert Plott, a professor of chemistry at Oxford University. He never came to realize what creature it belonged to, though. At first, he thought it was some species of elephant brought to Britain by Romans. A bit later, Plott arrived at the conclusion that it was the remains of a drowned human. The assumption that the bone could have belonged to some archaic animal only came about 150 years later. In 1815, another professor at Oxford University, William Buckland, during one of his trips, found a jaw fragment belonging to some previously unknown animal. Buckland supposed that it was the jaw of some prehistoric reptile that he called the megalosaurus. However, it didn't gain popularity. But in 1850, the Timperley family found a well-preserved ichthysaur skeleton. At first, they brought it home, intending to carefully study the odd thing. But the Timperleys were highly religious people, and the find didn't seem to fit their idea of the world. That's why they took the bones to a quarry and buried them. The ichthyosaur spent another century and a half in the ground. It was only in 2014 that a descendant of the Timperleys dug up and restored the skeleton. In Victorian England, no one had heard anything about evolution yet. So, all fossils that ran counter to the religious doctrine were generally dubbed quirks of nature. Dinosaur bones and teeth were thought to be remnants of giant fish. And everything that fell beyond the common worldview went straight back to where it came from—the ground. Apparently, Victorian scientists imagined dinosaurs like this. But everything changed in the late 19th century. Discoveries in paleontology were made practically every hour. Exhibitions of dinosaur skeletons attracted large crowds, while scientists competed over the right to take credit for newfound remnants. American paleontologists Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope became famous for the so-called Bone Wars. Those two not only attacked each other in scientific publications, but their rivalry included bribing fossil hunters, stealing finds, and even a couple of broken bones—dinosaur bones. Together, Marsh and Cope discovered and described 142 new dinosaur species. But they were so consumed with their rivalry that they had no time to double-check all their finds for authenticity. In 1978, Edward Cope claimed that he'd found a vertebra belonging to the biggest dinosaur that had ever existed. That vertebra was around 1.5 meters high. The dinosaur it belonged to was supposed to have been approximately 60 meters long. That was almost double the size of any other species known at that time. The American Museum of Natural History was virtually ready to buy the vertebra to shock its audience at a new exhibition. In the archives of the museum, there are still records of that relic. But no one ever got to see that vertebra. Most likely, Cope just made it up. But too bad. Back then, dinosaurs were thought to be giant, bloodthirsty monsters. So such an exhibit would have attracted a huge crowd for that museum. But the biggest deception started with the movie era. The first time a dinosaur appeared on the big screen was in 1914. In a short movie called Brute Force. However, the dinosaurs we know today were first featured in Jurassic Park in 1993. From a scientific perspective, there's hardly anything in this movie that would have been right. Even the title is a blooper. All the dinosaurs shown in the movie actually lived in the Cretaceous period that came after the Jurassic era. But that's nothing compared to what this movie did to the appearance of dinosaurs. Look at the size of velociraptors in the movie. Now compare this to their real life size. Couldn't it be that the filmmakers didn't know this? No, of course they knew. And the rest of the crews producing similar movies also knew. There was even a science consultant on the set of Jurassic Park, Jack Horner, a paleontologist. But Steven Spielberg, who was directing the movie, thought that realistic dinosaurs wouldn't look frightening and wouldn't become a box office success. And that's why they were turned into giant toothy reptiles. But the truth is, not all dinosaurs were reptiles. And more so, not all of them were giant. Nowadays, scientists believe that most carnivorous dinosaurs were warm-blooded and had feathers, not scales. This information was picked up by MythBusters. And now dinosaurs are shown like this. Previously, the world of cinema misled us in terms of their appearance to make us enjoy the visuals. Now popular science channels do the same just to make us watch them. And yet again, how did dinosaurs really look? Although there are lots of well-preserved bones, restoring them is actually quite a task. To turn this into this. We need to understand the way their ligaments and muscles worked, how much subcutaneous fat was there, and what skin texture they had. In this case, scientists can use research on fossils and try to build digital biomechanical models. For instance, a Tyrannosaurus used to be depicted as being almost orthograd, that is, walking upright. Now scientists figured out that its body was placed parallel to the ground. Dinosaurs had well-developed muscles and almost zero subcutaneous fat. Tyrannosauruses could kill their prey only with the help of their jaws. And that's why they had powerful neck muscles. An analysis of alligator and turkey bones conducted in 2018 got scientists thinking that perhaps the forelimbs of a T-Rex were reaching not down, but rather towards each other. But what about feathers? For example, studying forearm bones of Velociraptors, scientists found distinctive marks. They're consistent with the ones that pigeons have, right in the place where wing feathers are located. Most likely, Velociraptors were closer to birds than reptiles. As for Tyrannosauruses, things are a bit more complicated. Scientists have no clear evidence that they had plumage, but some related species were found to have protofeathers resembling porcupine quills. Maybe T-Rexes had something like that? So it seems that they were more like giant rodents than reptiles or birds. That doesn't make them any less scary or dangerous, right? What do you think? Which of the T-Rex versions do you find more intimidating? Tyrannosaurus fish? T-Rex parrot? Or giant prehistoric rat? Write your ideas in the comments.