CONTENTS Acknowledgments Introduction What Is a Dinosaur How Do We Know about Dinosaurs Where and When Did They Live Dinosaurs and Hips Dinosaur Colors and Patterns Dinosaur Timeline The Triassic Period The Jurassic Period The Cretaceous Period Extinction Glossary About the Authors 7 8 9 11 12 13 15 18 20 28 64 137 143 144
Acknowledgments We would like to acknowledge the scientists who have helped us in our work Matthew Lamanna Peter Dodson Michael Brett Surman Kirk Johnson Jim Kirkland Tom Holtz Dan Chure George Englemann Cathy Forster Zhe Xi Luo James Farlow Ralph Chapman and Linda Deck Many thanks to our assistant Marie Dileva and to the artists who assisted us on the murals for the Carnegie Museum of Natural History and Dinosaur National Monument Jeff Breeden Erin Cobb Laura Fields Jenn Hall Bruce Mohn Harry Saffren Paul Sorton and Kay Wood
Introduction We are paleoartists that is artists who work with paleontologists to recreate the look of extinct animals by examining their fossils putting the bones together covering them with muscles and skin and adding exterior colors to show what they would have looked like in life We have been doing this for over sixty years combined We are fortunate to work with museums around the world including different from the animals who roamed the Earth before the Mesozoic the Smithsonian and Dinosaur National Monument and now we’d We also explore how different types of dinosaurs are related to each like to share some of that work with you in this book Here you will see other and how some of them survived the extinction event at the end your old favorites like T rex and Triceratops but you will also discover of the Cretaceous Period and evolved into the birds we see around strange and interesting new dinosaurs us today There have been more dinosaurs discovered in the past ten years Paleoartists have to know how to reconstruct prehistoric plant life than in all of the history of paleontology dating back to the 1850s too And the plants you see in the art inside were also rendered after Inside you will discover probably for the first time some of the most much discovery and study of plant fossils As such you will also get important new finds a chance to see dinosaurs in their environments at specific times and The nearly 150 dinosaurs featured here cover the three main places including two spectacular three long foot gatefold illustrations periods of the Mesozoic Era Triassic Jurassic and Cretaceous of our murals that reside in the Carnegie Museum of Natural History’s when dinosaurs dominated life on Earth and represent a diverse Dinosaurs In Their Time exhibit one of the largest and most to up range of types sizes and shapes Each dinosaur includes a color full date dinosaur displays in the world illustration an information key with name size location and more We hope you and your family will enjoy this book and that maybe and descriptive text with interesting facts about each animal In you too will discover a new dinosaur one day general dinosaurs are grouped as either hipped bird Ornithischia or hipped lizard Saurischia It is this hip structure that made them Bob Walters and Tess Kissinger 8
What Is a Dinosaur Dinosaurs were among the most successful animals to inhabit the extinction event that occurred at the end of the Mesozoic Era planet Earth They dominated terrestrial life for nearly 160 million years in what has been called The Age of Dinosaurs However not all dinosaurs died out in 65 million years ago In fact they are still here among us and have been all this time they surround us in their billions and we call them birds In 1842 British naturalist and anatomist Sir Richard Owen first gave the official name Dinosauria to a group of three extinct reptiles discovered in England Iguanodon Megalosaurus and Hylaeosaurus Though the name in Greek means Terrible Lizards dinosaurs are not lizards Also there were many other kinds of reptiles living at the same time but these were not dinosaurs Pterosaurs flying reptiles and dwelling sea reptiles that lived during the Mesozoic Era are not classified as dinosaurs The dinosaurs are different from other reptilian groups in the structure of their limbs looked like may be quite different from one species to the next Mammals in contrast have different kinds of teeth for different uses such as tearing cutting grinding etc There were a lot more dinosaurs that ate plants than ate meat Some dinosaurs walked on two legs and some larger ones walked on four legs and some of the biggest may have reared up on hind legs to reach treetops They laid hard shelled eggs sometimes in communal nesting grounds caring for their young The earliest dinosaurs were small three to five feet long bipedal two legged hunters speedy and agile It seems amazing and ironic that some of these diminutive creatures evolved into the enormous behemoths of the Jurassic Period and then still later into modern birds Dinosaur eggs Sir Richard Owen particularly the pelvis the hip and hind legs which allowed them to walk in an upright manner just as mammals do Another distinctive feature is that each species of dinosaur had only one kind of tooth although what that tooth Hadrosaurus skeleton 9
