The Dinosauria

"This is the most technical book of my five. It is, if you like, the current bible of dinosaur studies. It’s a massive compilation and a technical review of everything we know about dinosaurs. It’s the most comprehensive single resource you can go to for information on dinosaurs. Well, it has summaries of all the recent research so it deals with the evolution of feathers and how dinosaurs actually got feathers and other bird-related characteristics before we actually get to birds themselves. It also presents summaries of the biology of dinosaurs, how they’re feeding and behaving, things like nocturnal behaviour, growth rate and a comprehensive review of all the different types of dinosaur and how they’re related to each other. It’s very likely that they were warm-blooded, though not necessarily in the same way as a modern mammal, but more advanced than what we might see in something like a lizard. As far as we know, all dinosaurs laid eggs though. We have very good evidence of dinosaur eggs – some of the fossils have embryos inside. We have no evidence of any dinosaur giving birth to live young. In that sense they are very reptile or birdlike. The Triceratops. It was always my favourite from when I was a kid. I love the massive Diplodocus in our central hall and have done some work on it in my professional career. My actual favourite we don’t have in the museum now. It’s one from South Africa called Heterodontosaurus, a very cute early plant-eating dinosaur about the size of a Labrador. As it was vegetarian as well, it would probably have been quite a good household pet. Oh yes! Deinocheirus from the Late Cretaceous of Mongolia. That’s still a mysterious animal. No one really knows what it is. That’s all that’s ever been found, those two very large arms. It’s probably a type of dinosaur called a therizinosaur which is a very weird group of dinosaurs that’s not very well-known, which are actually close relatives of a lot of meat-eating dinosaurs but that became secondarily vegetarian, so they’re very odd, but the arms are all that’s ever been discovered of that particular species of dinosaur."