182 Fun Facts About Dinosaurs

In which type of rock are nearly all dinosaur fossils found?

Sedimentary: bones buried under sand, mud or silt survive as the layers harden, while most igneous and metamorphic rock forms under heat and pressure that ruin fossils.

Which geological period ended long before any dinosaur existed?

Cambrian: Adam Sedgwick named it in 1835 after Cambria, the Latin name for Wales, where he studied its rocks.

Which bird is the heaviest dinosaur alive today?

Ostrich: despite the myth, it doesn't bury its head in sand, though one lying low with its head and neck flat on the ground can look that way from afar.

Which sitcom's main characters include a paleontologist?

Friends: Ross Geller is a paleontologist, and in one episode he makes a huge fuss when someone at work eats his sandwich.

Microraptor, a small dinosaur from China, had an extra pair of feathered wings on which body part?

Its legs: long flight feathers on its legs as well as its arms gave Microraptor four wings, and one skeleton holds a bird it had caught and eaten.

Which probable plant-eater had hand claws more than half a metre long?

Therizinosaurus: it most likely used those claws to hook and pull leafy branches within reach, much as a sloth uses its long claws to reach food.

In which Ben Stiller comedy does a dinosaur skeleton come alive?

Night at the Museum: after it opened, New York's real natural history museum drew about a fifth more holiday visitors, a jump officials partly credited to the film.

Which cartoon family keeps a pet dinosaur named Dino?

The Flintstones: Hanna-Barbera drew on the sitcom The Honeymooners, which is why its two neighbouring couples behave so much like that show's pairs.

Nigersaurus, a sauropod from Niger with a wide, vacuum-cleaner-like muzzle, had roughly how many teeth?

500: its teeth wore down so fast that each one was replaced about every 14 days, the fastest rate known for any dinosaur.

What does the word "dinosaur" mean?

Terrible lizard: Richard Owen coined the word in 1842, though he meant its Greek root in the sense of 'fearfully great', to evoke the animals' sheer size.

What is the name of the crater left by the asteroid that caused the dinosaur extinction?

Chicxulub Crater: geophysicists hunting for oil in Mexico found its buried outline years before scientists recognised it as the scar of the impact.

Jurassic Park gave which real dinosaur a fictional neck frill and the ability to spit venom?

Dilophosaurus: Michael Crichton's novel invented the venom and the film's designers added the neck frill, but no fossil evidence backs either one.

Hadrosaurus, the first dinosaur skeleton ever mounted for display, was dug up in which state?

New Jersey: Joseph Leidy reconstructed Hadrosaurus standing upright on its hind limbs, against the view then that such dinosaurs walked on all fours.

Which of these animals only appeared after the last non-bird dinosaurs had died out?

Woolly mammoths: they arose long after the dinosaurs, and a small population still survived in the Arctic until about 4,000 years ago.

Iguanodon and the duck-billed hadrosaurs belong to which dinosaur group?

Ornithopods: chewing was their big advantage, and hadrosaurs ground plants with batteries of stacked cheek teeth, one reason they became such successful plant-eaters.

Insects from the age of dinosaurs are often preserved in amber, which is fossilised what?

Tree resin: yet a 2013 study found no ancient DNA even in bees trapped in resin only about 10,000 years old, a blow to hopes of cloning dinosaurs.

About how long ago did the first dinosaurs appear?

About 230 million years ago: yet dinosaurs only took over the land after a mass extinction about 200 million years ago wiped out many rival reptiles.

Which dinosaur had a club-like tail it could use as a weapon?

Ankylosaurus: its first skeletal reconstruction had no tail club at all, because the club itself wasn't dug up until a later expedition.

Sail-backed Dimetrodon is often mistaken for a dinosaur, but it was more closely related to which animals?

Mammals: Dimetrodon was an early synapsid, on the branch that led to mammals, and it died out in the Permian, long before any dinosaur lived.

Dinosaur Provincial Park, rich in Late Cretaceous fossils, is in which Canadian province?

Alberta: erosion at the end of the last ice age carved out the park's badlands and laid bare its fossil-rich rock.

A large part of Tyrannosaurus rex's brain was devoted to which sense?

Smell: its huge olfactory bulbs suggest it could sniff out carcasses from far away, much as vultures do today.

Who directed the original 1993 film Jurassic Park?

Steven Spielberg: he planned to animate the dinosaurs with go-motion puppets until a computer test by ILM impressed him so much that he switched to CGI.

Paleontologists call the spikes on Stegosaurus's tail the 'thagomizer', a word taken from what?

A Far Side cartoon: Gary Larson made the word up as a caveman joke, and it caught on so well that the Smithsonian used it as the spikes' official name.

Which kind of plant first appeared long after the first dinosaurs?

Flowers: flowering plants turned up more than 100 million years ago, so the earliest dinosaurs lived in a world without a single flower.

Which of these flying reptiles, living alongside dinosaurs, had the biggest wingspan?

Quetzalcoatlus: with a wingspan of about 10 metres or more, it probably stalked small prey on the ground, much like a giant stork.

Which fish, thought to have died out with the dinosaurs, was found alive off South Africa in 1938?

Coelacanth: museum curator Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer spotted the strange fish and called in fish expert JLB Smith to identify it.

What is the name of the famous T. Rex skeleton on display at the Field Museum in Chicago?

Sue: it's named after fossil hunter Sue Hendrickson, who found it, and federal agents seized the skeleton in 1992 amid a fight over who owned it.

Pachycephalosaurus is best known for which distinctive feature?

Thick domed skull: some scientists think rivals rammed heads with it like bighorn sheep, while others argue the dome was mainly for display.

Which industrialist financed Dippy, the Diplodocus whose casts went to museums worldwide?

Andrew Carnegie: when Britain's king saw a drawing of the skeleton at Carnegie's Scottish home, Carnegie agreed to give the nation a cast of it.

When the first dinosaurs appeared, nearly all land was joined in which supercontinent?

Pangaea: that's why fossils of the same land animals, such as Lystrosaurus, turn up on continents that are now oceans apart.

The smallest living dinosaur, the bee hummingbird, is native to which country?

Cuba: the female alone builds a tiny cup of spider webs and bark, then feeds her chicks with no help from the male.

Tyrannosaurus rex lived closer in time to which of these than to Stegosaurus?

Humans: T. rex appeared roughly 80 million years after Stegosaurus died out, while about 66 million years separate the last T. rex from us.

The Cleveland-Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry, one of the densest Jurassic bone beds known, is in which state?

Utah: most of its bones come from meat-eaters, which may have been killed by drought or drawn into a predator trap.

Oviraptor means 'egg thief', but why is that name now thought unfair?

It was brooding its own nest: the first skeleton lay on eggs blamed on another dinosaur, until later finds of skeletons sitting on nests showed it was a parent.

Tyrannosaurus rex's famously tiny arms were unusually what for their size?

Strong: they were attached to hefty muscles, and some scientists think they helped T. rex push itself back up after a fall.

Which 19th-century fossil hunter discovered several marine reptile species in England?

Mary Anning: as a woman she couldn't join the Geological Society, and the men who bought her fossils often left her out of their papers.

What is a coprolite?

Fossilized dinosaur dung: William Buckland named coprolites after a fossil collector noticed that the odd stones held bits of bone inside.

Which feature helped giant sauropods keep their huge skeletons light?

Air sacs in hollow bones: sauropods were once pictured wallowing in water to bear their weight, until evidence showed they were built for dry land.

Which vast volcanic eruptions spanned the boundary that ended the dinosaurs?

Deccan Traps in India: some scientists argue their gases helped kill the dinosaurs, but most now think the asteroid did far more of the damage.

Othniel Charles Marsh's bitter rival in the 19th-century Bone Wars was which Philadelphia paleontologist?

Edward Drinker Cope: his race with Marsh to be first with new dinosaurs became a bitter feud that damaged both men's reputations.

In the Jurassic Park franchise, what fictional company cloned the dinosaurs?

InGen: in the story its scientists pulled dinosaur DNA from blood inside ancient mosquitoes that had been trapped in amber.

The thin clay layer marking the end of the dinosaurs is unusually rich in which rare metal?

Iridium: asteroids hold far more of it than Earth's crust does, which led scientists in 1980 to blame a giant impact for the extinction.

Which pose, still seen in birds today, was the small dinosaur Mei long fossilised in?

Sleeping: it lay curled with its snout tucked under a forelimb, and it was probably buried suddenly while still alive, which kept that pose.

Which feathered Liaoning dinosaur was the first non-bird dinosaur to have its life colours described from fossils?

Sinosauropteryx: preserved pigment shows a banded tail, stripes that probably helped camouflage the little dinosaur.

Which theropod had two prominent horns above its eyes and arms even tinier than T. Rex's?

Carnotaurus: nobody is sure what its horns were for, but some scientists think rivals used them, along with its muscular neck, to fight one another.

The name of the Cretaceous period comes from the Latin word for what?

Chalk: Cretaceous comes from the Latin creta, chalk, after the thick chalk beds of that age across western Europe, such as the White Cliffs of Dover.

In which 1933 film do explorers battle dinosaurs deep in an uncharted jungle?

King Kong: stop-motion pioneer Willis O'Brien brought Kong and the dinosaurs to life by moving small models a fraction at a time between frames.

Maiasaura's nesting sites, described in 1979, gave the first evidence that dinosaurs did what?

Care of its young: an adult was found beside a nest of youngsters, and the find overturned the old idea that dinosaurs simply laid eggs and left them.

What geological era is famously known as the 'Age of Dinosaurs'?

Mesozoic Era: it ended with a mass extinction that killed off not only the non-bird dinosaurs but also the ammonites in the seas.

A 2015 study revived Brontosaurus after decades of it being lumped into which sauropod genus?

Apatosaurus: Marsh published that name two years before Brontosaurus, so when scientists decided they were one animal, Apatosaurus had priority.

Which small Jurassic dinosaur was found with a lizard preserved inside its belly?

Compsognathus: the lizard remains show it hunted small, fast prey, making it one of the few dinosaurs whose diet is known for sure.

Iguanodon is known for a distinctive large spike on which part of its body?

Thumb: the cone-shaped spike probably helped fend off predators, while a long, flexible fifth finger could grab food.

The 1980 asteroid-impact dinosaur extinction hypothesis is named after which father-and-son scientists?

Alvarez: their theory says the impact threw so much debris into the sky that Earth was plunged into a long, freezing darkness.

What do paleontologists think Stegosaurus's back plates were mainly for?

Display and/or thermoregulation: Marsh first thought the plates lay flat like roof tiles, until a specimen held in mud showed they stood upright.

Which sauropod's front legs were longer than its hind legs, tilting its back upward?

Brachiosaurus: it couldn't chew, so it swallowed leaves whole and relied on fermentation in its gut to break them down.

Baryonyx, found by an amateur collector in an English clay pit in 1983, had what in its stomach?

Fish scales: it was the first meat-eating dinosaur shown to eat fish, and it may have hooked them out of rivers with its huge claws.

Which reptile is the last survivor of a group that thrived in the age of dinosaurs?

Tuatara: rats and habitat loss wiped it out on mainland New Zealand, so naturally wild tuatara now survive only on offshore islands.

Which Victorian novelist opened a book by imagining a Megalosaurus plodding through muddy city streets?

Charles Dickens: Bleak House has it waddling like a giant lizard, as scientists then pictured it, though later finds showed it walked on its hind limbs alone.

Pterosaurs held up their wings mainly with which body part?

A long fourth finger: their wings were skin, not feathers, and although they lived alongside dinosaurs, pterosaurs were a separate group of reptiles.

Which bird-like dinosaur with feathers and teeth is a classic transitional fossil?

Archaeopteryx: found in Germany in 1861, just two years after Darwin's On the Origin of Species, it seemed to confirm his theory of evolution.

Cryolophosaurus, a crested predator from the Early Jurassic, got its nickname from which singer's hairstyle?

Elvis Presley: its crest fanned sideways across its head like a pompadour, and it was too weak to use as a weapon, so it was probably for display.

A 19th-century dinosaur skeleton drew such crowds that the Academy of Natural Sciences began doing what?

Charging admission: yet much of that skeleton was really sculpted, because only part of the animal had been found and the rest was modelled to complete it.

How big was a real Velociraptor compared to its Jurassic Park portrayal?

Much smaller, closer to a turkey: the films modelled their scaly raptors on the bigger Deinonychus, though Velociraptor is now thought to have had feathers.

Which giant sauropod, among the largest land animals ever, is known only from fragmentary remains?

Argentinosaurus: a 2013 computer model of its skeleton and muscles showed that this giant could walk, but only at a slow plod.

What does the name Allosaurus mean?

Different lizard: a supposed giant cousin, Saurophaganax, now looks like a mix-up, with many of its bones belonging to this very dinosaur.

Giganotosaurus's species name carolinii honours whom?

Its discoverer: amateur fossil hunter Rubén Carolini spotted the huge leg bone while driving a dune buggy through the badlands of Patagonia.

The giant African predator Carcharodontosaurus is named after which animal?

Great white shark: its long, serrated teeth looked a lot like a great white's, which inspired a name built on Carcharodon, the shark's scientific name.

Matching fossils on continents now oceans apart supported whose 1912 theory of continental drift?

Alfred Wegener: his continental drift idea became the forerunner of plate tectonics, the theory geologists now use to explain how continents move.

Preserved pigment suggests the small dinosaur Microraptor had feathers that looked how?

Iridescent: its glossy black feathers probably shimmered, and in many living birds such a sheen is used for showing off in displays.

Kentrosaurus was dug up at Tendaguru, in what was then German East Africa; which country is that today?

Tanzania: German expeditions dug up so many Kentrosaurus bones there that scientists could assemble whole skeletons, one of which stands in Berlin.

Which horned dinosaur had one long nose horn, no brow horns and long spikes around its frill?

Styracosaurus: the number of long spikes around its frill varied between individuals, and they may have served for display or for defence against predators.

In which Jules Verne novel do explorers see sea reptiles fight on an underground ocean?

Journey to the Center of the Earth: after crossing that hidden sea, the explorers are blasted back to the surface by the eruption of Stromboli, in Italy.

At Lightning Ridge in Australia, some dinosaur bones have turned into which gemstone?

Opal: miners digging for the gem at Lightning Ridge brought up an opal-filled jaw that turned out to be a new plant-eating dinosaur, Weewarrasaurus.

Dinosaur fossils are far too old to date with which famous method?

Radiocarbon dating: carbon-14 has a half-life of 5,730 years, so the method only reaches back about 50,000 years, not tens of millions.

Corythosaurus, a plant-eater with a tall, rounded head ornament, takes its name from the Greek for what?

Helmet: many specimens with less developed head ornaments were once named as separate species, until Peter Dodson showed they were juveniles of bigger kinds.

Super Mario World's designer first pictured Mario punching which dinosaur on the head?

Yoshi: designer Shigefumi Hino said Yoshi's tongue was meant to shoot out in surprise when Mario punched him, a move later passed off as pointing.

Which animated film imagines the dinosaur-killing asteroid missing Earth?

The Good Dinosaur: its story flips the boy-and-dog tale, as a timid young dinosaur named Arlo bonds with a human boy named Spot.

Which famous fossil site, full of saber-toothed cats, is far too young to hold any dinosaurs?

La Brea Tar Pits: its fossils are under about 40,000 years old, so they came tens of millions of years after the last non-bird dinosaurs died out.

Which 1990s kids' show had its heroes pilot giant robot beasts called Dinozords?

Power Rangers: its fight scenes reused Japanese Super Sentai footage, which worked because the Rangers' faces are never seen in battle.

Birds and crocodilians are the only living members of which reptile group, which also included the dinosaurs?

Archosaurs: the name came to be read as 'ruling reptiles', and the group's dinosaurs went on to dominate life on land.

Hard dinosaur eggshells, like those of birds, were made mainly of which mineral?

Calcium carbonate: the hard shell was also dotted with tiny pores that let gases and water pass between the embryo and the outside world.

Nanuqsaurus, a tyrannosaur from northern Alaska, takes its name from the Iñupiaq word for which animal?

Polar bear: Nanuqsaurus stayed in the Arctic all year, so it had to cope with months of constant winter darkness.

Which fast-food company helped Chicago's Field Museum buy its famous T. rex skeleton?

McDonald's: it also sponsored a travelling exhibition built around a full-size cast of the skeleton.

Suchomimus, a long-snouted hunter from Niger, has a name meaning what?

Crocodile mimic: it had a long, narrow skull like a crocodile's, with hook-like teeth suited to snaring slippery fish.

Which web browser shows a pixelated T. rex game when you try to load a page offline?

Google Chrome: its designers chose a dinosaur as a joke that being offline is like going back to the 'prehistoric ages' before Wi-Fi.

The sauropod Brontomerus, named for its enormous hip muscles, has a name meaning what?

Thunder thighs: its describers said those huge thigh muscles could have given predators a hefty kick.

Which Alaskan national park preserves dinosaur tracks?

Denali: the tracks lie in rock laid down when dinosaurs roamed forests there under a milder climate.

Which Stravinsky work scores the dinosaurs' reign and extinction in Disney's Fantasia?

The Rite of Spring: its 1913 Paris premiere caused such an uproar that it is often called a riot.

Which giant sauropod has a name meaning 'fears nothing'?

Dreadnoughtus: even its not-yet-grown specimen was about 26 metres long, so a healthy adult probably had little to fear from predators.

A DNA survey of Loch Ness found no sign of its supposed plesiosaur, but which animal's DNA was abundant?

Eels: eel DNA turned up in such volume that lead scientist Neil Gemmell said he couldn't rule out eels grown to an extreme size.

Which star leads a mission to collect giant dinosaurs' DNA in 2025's Jurassic World Rebirth?

Scarlett Johansson: her team needs samples from three colossal species because they hold the key to a life-saving heart disease drug.

In the film Jurassic Park, scientists fill gaps in their dinosaur DNA with DNA from which animals?

Frogs: the park bred only females, but some frogs can switch sex in single-sex groups, so the dinosaurs could too, and they began to breed.

Britain's Natural History Museum replaced Dippy, its famous Diplodocus cast, with the skeleton of which animal?

A blue whale: Dippy, the cast it replaced, then set off on a tour of museums around the UK.

Which effects artist's team built the life-size animatronic dinosaurs for 1993's Jurassic Park?

Stan Winston got the job after the director saw the huge Alien Queen he had built for Aliens.

In The Lost World: Jurassic Park, a T. rex runs loose in which US city?

San Diego: the company's new boss had a live T. rex shipped there to launch a new dinosaur park on the mainland.

In his 1975 'Dinosaur Renaissance' article, paleontologist Robert Bakker argued that dinosaurs were what?

Warm-blooded: dinosaurs had long been pictured as sluggish, cold-blooded reptiles, and his case for active animals helped overturn that image.

Australovenator ('Banjo') and the sauropod found beside it were nicknamed after which famous Australian song?

Waltzing Matilda: Banjo Paterson wrote the song around Winton, near where the sauropod 'Matilda' was found lying beside 'Banjo'.

The dinosaur Deinocheirus was known for decades almost only from what?

A pair of giant arms: when fuller skeletons turned up almost 50 years later, they revealed a heavy omnivore with a duck-like bill.

In Ray Bradbury's story A Sound of Thunder, what does a hunter crush while on a T. rex safari?

A butterfly: when the hunters return to the present, the election has been won by Deutscher, a would-be dictator, instead of Keith.

What is the genetically engineered hybrid dinosaur that breaks loose in the 2015 film Jurassic World?

Indominus rex: the park had it designed to revive visitor interest, because ordinary dinosaurs no longer drew the crowds they once did.

In Jurassic World Dominion, which giant genetically engineered creatures threaten the world's crops?

Locusts: the company Biosyn bred them to devour any crops not grown from its own seed, a scheme to corner the world's food supply.

In Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, who guides the herd through the underground world of dinosaurs?

Buck: the one-eyed weasel leads the herd to rescue Sid, who was carried below by a mother T. rex after he adopted her three eggs.

In Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, what are the dinosaurs rescued from Isla Nublar secretly meant for?

An auction: yet by the next film, dinosaurs roam and hunt among people all over the world.

The small Jurassic dinosaur Yi qi used an elongated third finger to support what?

A membranous gliding wing: instead of feathered wings like a bird's, Yi qi had skin membranes that may have looked more like a bat's wings.

The superbly preserved nodosaur Borealopelta was found in what kind of site in Canada?

An oil sands mine: miner Shawn Funk noticed odd rock fragments in the bank he was digging, and they proved to be one of the best-preserved armoured dinosaurs ever found.

Zuul, an armoured dinosaur, is named after a monster from which comedy film?

Ghostbusters: its horned head reminded its describers of the film's Zuul, and its species name means 'shin destroyer', after its tail club.

Which comedy strands a scientist in a strange world full of dinosaurs and lizard men?

Land of the Lost: Will Ferrell's scientist is mocked for his time-travel theories, but he builds his device anyway, and it hurls him into that world.

The dinosaur Dracorex's species name honours which fictional school?

Hogwarts: its full name means 'dragon king of Hogwarts', though it may simply be a juvenile Pachycephalosaurus.

Which painter lived and painted at a New Mexico ranch now famous for its Coelophysis dinosaur fossils?

Georgia O'Keeffe: the ranch's landscape filled many of her paintings, and a dig there in 1947 uncovered hundreds of Coelophysis skeletons in one quarry.

The giant roadside Cabazon Dinosaurs famously appear in which comedy film?

Pee-wee's Big Adventure: a search for his stolen bike sends Pee-wee on a journey across the country that takes him to the statues.

Which giant marine reptile stars in the lagoon feeding show at the park in Jurassic World?

Mosasaurus: the real animal was a giant marine lizard, probably related to monitor lizards or snakes, rather than a dinosaur.

In the 1990s puppet sitcom Dinosaurs, what does the baby famously hit his father over the head with?

A frying pan: the show ended darkly, as the dinosaurs' own carelessness toward nature brings on an Ice Age that wipes them out.

In Disney's 2000 film Dinosaur, which animals raise the Iguanodon Aladar?

Lemurs: when disaster wrecks their island home, Aladar and his lemur family join a herd of plant-eaters trekking to the Nesting Grounds.

How does Michael Crichton's novel Jurassic Park end for the dinosaurs' island?

The military bombs it: yet the survivors learn that some animals had already escaped to the Costa Rican mainland.

In the animated film We're Back!, what makes a group of dinosaurs smart and friendly?

Brain Grain cereal: its inventor, Captain Neweyes, then flies the dinosaurs in his time-travelling ship to present-day New York.

At the Tanis fossil site, what part of the fish held tiny glass beads from the dinosaur-killing asteroid impact?

Their gills: the beads rained down within about an hour of the impact, and fish swimming through the water caught them as they breathed.

In the British TV series Primeval, how do prehistoric creatures turn up in the present day?

Through time anomalies: Nick Cutter leads a team of scientists investigating them and tracking down the creatures that come through.

How did ichthyosaurs, the fish-shaped marine reptiles, reproduce?

They gave birth to live young: fossils of females with embryos show it, so these fully aquatic reptiles never had to come ashore to lay eggs.

The Jurassic period is named after mountains running along the border between which two countries?

France and Switzerland: the period takes its name from the Jura Mountains on their border, where rocks of this age were first studied.

Germany's Solnhofen limestone, rich in fossils, was long quarried for which printing process?

Lithography: the fine, flat-splitting stone was cut for printing stones and tiles, and that quarrying is how so many fossils came to light.

Studies of new fossils argue that the sail-backed Spinosaurus was what?

Semi-aquatic: its dense, penguin-like bones suggest it spent much of its time in water hunting prey, though scientists still debate how well it swam.

Paleontologist Jack Horner, adviser on the Jurassic Park films, is believed to have inspired which character?

Alan Grant: Horner said Spielberg reshaped the novel's Montana dinosaur expert into a character more like Horner himself.

In 2005, what did Mary Schweitzer's team find inside the leg bone of a Tyrannosaurus rex?

Flexible soft tissue: it included stretchy blood vessels, and a bone layer that female birds grow before laying eggs showed the animal was female.

Who stars as the space pilot who crash-lands on prehistoric Earth among dinosaurs in the 2023 film 65?

Adam Driver: his pilot, Mills, must lead the only other survivor, a young girl named Koa, across dinosaur country before an asteroid strikes.

In the animated film The Land Before Time, where is the young dinosaur Littlefoot journeying?

The Great Valley: Littlefoot sets out for it after a T. rex kills his mother while she is protecting him.

Which actor plays Owen Grady, the raptor trainer in 2015's Jurassic World?

Chris Pratt: his Owen has trained a pack of Velociraptors to follow his commands, and even rides a motorbike alongside them.

Which character leads the expedition in Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World?

Professor Challenger: when the reporter Malone first calls on him, Challenger throws him into the street, then warms to him once Malone refuses to press charges.

Which streaming service released Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous, the animated series about campers stranded on Isla Nublar?

Netflix: the campers are stranded when the dinosaurs break loose during the events of the 2015 film Jurassic World, so their story runs alongside it.

Which American oil company adopted a green long-necked dinosaur mascot?

Sinclair: the dinosaur was meant to stress the vast age of the crude oils behind its motor oils, and it starred in a Sinclair exhibit at Chicago's 1933-34 World's Fair.

What does the name Ornithischia mean?

Bird-hipped: their pubis bone pointed backwards like a bird's, yet birds actually descend from the 'lizard-hipped' dinosaurs.

What happened to Ernst Stromer's original Spinosaurus fossils?

They were destroyed in World War II: a 1944 bombing raid on Munich wrecked them, leaving scientists little to study until new fossils emerged this century.

In the 'Fighting Dinosaurs' fossil, a Velociraptor is locked in combat with what?

Protoceratops: found by a Polish-Mongolian team in 1971, the pair may have been buried by a collapsing dune or a sandstorm.

Which bone, familiar from roast chicken dinners, was first found in a Tyrannosaurus rex in a specimen nicknamed Bucky?

Wishbone, or furcula, turns up in several groups of meat-eating dinosaurs, tyrannosaurs and spinosaurs included, one of many features they share with birds.

A large canal in the hip region of Stegosaurus's spine, noted by Othniel Marsh, inspired which long-lived myth?

A second brain in the hips was the theory, since the canal could have held a structure up to 20 times larger than the famously small brain in the skull.

Naturalist Robert Plot, who drew a huge dinosaur thigh bone in the 1670s, finally decided it came from what?

A biblical giant was his final verdict, reached after he ruled out a Roman war elephant. His engraving was the first illustration of a dinosaur bone ever published.

Villagers in Henan, China, were reported in 2007 to be using dinosaur fossils as medicine under which name?

Dragon bones, or long gu, have been prescribed in Chinese medicine for some two thousand years, though most are really fossil rhinos, deer, hyenas and other far younger animals.

Which feature of the hip socket, found in nearly all dinosaur skeletons, sets them apart from other reptiles?

A hole through it marks the dinosaur hip socket, or acetabulum, which is open at the centre of its inner surface. It goes with hind legs held erect beneath the body, as in birds.

Fenestrae, the large openings in the sides of dinosaur skulls, take their name from the Latin word for what?

Windows is the meaning of fenestrae. Dinosaurs, as diapsids, started out with two pairs of them in the rear of the skull, plus extra openings in the snout and lower jaw.

Osteoderms, the bony plates and studs on the backs of armoured dinosaurs, formed within which part of the body?

The skin is where osteoderms form, as bony deposits in the dermis. Crocodilians and armadillos still carry the same kind of armour today.

A layer of medullary bone inside a Montana Tyrannosaurus rex's femur, otherwise seen only in birds, revealed what?

It was female: the layer forms only in female birds around ovulation, so the 16-to-20-year-old dinosaur nicknamed B-rex was old enough to breed.

In ornithischian dinosaurs such as Stegosaurus, which hip bone pointed down and backwards, parallel with the ischium?

Pubis is the bone that sorts dinosaurs into their two great orders: in saurischians such as Tyrannosaurus it jutted forwards, as in lizards and other ancestral reptiles.

Scleral rings, the circles of small bony plates preserved in some dinosaur skulls, supported which organ?

The eye sat inside the ring. The ring's opening is wider, relative to the eye socket, in night-active birds than in day-active ones, which has been used to argue that some dinosaurs were nocturnal.

Which dinosaur do the visitors find lying sick during their tour in the 1993 film Jurassic Park?

Triceratops gets the film's quietest scene, played by a life-size animatronic that the effects crew had only four months to build after the director moved the shoot forward.

Which toothless, fast-running dinosaur swerves past the heroes like a flock of birds in a famous Jurassic Park stampede?

Gallimimus got the scene because the director wanted a stampede; in the 1990 novel the herd was made of duck-billed hadrosaurs instead.

Which Jurassic meat-eater had a ridge-like horn on its snout and a row of small bony plates down its back?

Ceratosaurus probably used its nose horn for show rather than as a weapon. Its row of back armour is unique among the meat-eating dinosaurs.

Which long-necked dinosaur rears up on its hind legs in the lobby of New York's American Museum of Natural History?

Barosaurus stands there as a cast, controversially posed rearing up to defend its young from an attacking predator.

Which Mongolian cousin of Tyrannosaurus rex was sent home after a New York sale in 2012 exposed a smuggling deal?

Tarbosaurus was at the heart of a million-dollar deal: the smuggler pleaded guilty, and in 2013 the skeleton went back to Mongolia to be shown in Ulaanbaatar's main square.

Which large predator from China's Liaoning Province is the biggest dinosaur known with direct evidence of feathers?

Yutyrannus means 'feathered tyrant', and its species name huali, Mandarin for beautiful, salutes the plumage preserved on its fossils.

Which small Asian dinosaur, named for its parrot-like beak, had a row of long bristles along the top of its tail?

Psittacosaurus is also the most species-rich of all the non-bird dinosaur genera, and one fossil preserves tube-like tail bristles about 16 centimetres long.

Which sauropod from Argentina carried two parallel rows of tall spines down its neck and back?

Amargasaurus had taller spines than any other known sauropod. They may have carried horny sheaths, or been linked by ligaments to hold up a sail along the neck.

Tooth-marked bones from Madagascar show that which predatory dinosaur sometimes ate its own kind?

Majungasaurus is one of the few dinosaurs with direct evidence of cannibalism. Its usual prey was long-necked sauropods such as Rapetosaurus, whose bones carry the same tooth marks.

Which duck-billed dinosaur is famous for 'mummified' specimens such as one found in Wyoming in 1908?

Edmontosaurus means 'lizard from Edmonton', after the rock formation where it was first found. Its 1908 'mummy' was dug up by the fossil hunter C. H. Sternberg and his sons.

Which Victorian anatomist, later the driving force behind London's Natural History Museum, coined the name Dinosauria?

Richard Owen coined it, and his statue stood in the museum's main hall until 2009, when it was replaced with a statue of Charles Darwin.

Stegosaurus was named by Othniel Marsh, who pictured its plates lying flat and overlapping; what does the name mean?

Roof lizard: Marsh imagined the plates overlapping like roof tiles, and at first took the remains for those of a turtle-like animal that lived in water.

Diplodocus is named for the oddly shaped chevron bones under its tail; what does its Greek-derived name mean?

Double beam describes the twin-pronged bones, once thought unique to Diplodocus. The tail made up about 55% of its length and may have worked like a very long bullwhip.

Dinosaur names ending in 'ceratops', such as Pentaceratops, are built from Greek words meaning what?

Horned face is the meaning, and Pentaceratops, 'five-horned face', overcounts: two of its five 'horns' are bony spikes jutting sideways from its cheeks.

Baryonyx, unearthed in an English clay pit in 1983, takes its name from Greek words meaning what?

Heavy claw refers to the very large claw on its first finger, a find made by an amateur fossil collector named William Walker.

Theropoda, the dinosaur group that includes Tyrannosaurus rex and Velociraptor, has a name meaning what?

Beast feet was Othniel Marsh's coinage of 1881. Most theropods walked on three main toes, which is why their trackways show three-toed prints.

Giganotosaurus, a huge predator unearthed in Argentina, has a name meaning 'giant' plus which kind of lizard?

Southern is the 'noto' in the name, from the Greek notos. Its describers thought it at least the largest meat-eating dinosaur of the Southern Hemisphere.

Seismosaurus, a giant sauropod named in 1991 and later folded into Diplodocus, had a name evoking which natural events?

Earthquakes: the name meant 'seismic lizard'. Studies in 2004 and 2006 concluded the giant was really a large Diplodocus, and it is now filed as Diplodocus hallorum.

A new dinosaur species is named from one reference specimen, sometimes a mere fragment, known by which term?

Holotype is the term, and it is not picked for quality: even if a far better skeleton turns up later, the original specimen is not superseded and still anchors the name.

Euoplocephalus, an armoured dinosaur from Canada, has a Greek name that describes which part of it as well-armed?

Head is the 'cephalus' in the name. It was first called Stereocephalus in 1902, but a beetle already held that name, so it had to be changed in 1910.

The Brazilian dinosaur Irritator got its name from the annoyance of scientists who discovered what about the fossil?

Its skull was doctored by collectors, who grafted pieces of the upper jaw onto the front of the snout. The museum that bought it only found out when the fossil was CT scanned.

Which Disney character gives its name to a small raptor dinosaur found in Montana by a 14-year-old fossil hunter?

Bambi was chosen because the skeleton is so small, under a metre long. Bambiraptor's second name, feinbergi, thanks the family who bought the specimen for a Florida museum.

Gojirasaurus, a Triassic predator found in New Mexico and named in 1997, honours which giant movie monster?

Godzilla is Gojira in Japanese, and the name was picked for size: at up to six metres long, the animal was one of the largest meat-eating dinosaurs of its day.

Sauroniops, a North African predator named from a single skull bone, honours a villain of which saga?

The Lord of the Rings supplied Sauron, and the name means 'Sauron's eye'. It suits a dinosaur named from a sturdy bone that sat just above the eye socket.

Which rock guitarist is honoured in the name of Masiakasaurus, a Madagascan predator, for inspiring the dig crew?

Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits is the one: the full name is Masiakasaurus knopfleri, chosen because his music inspired the expedition crew as they worked.

Qantassaurus, a small Australian plant-eater named in 1999, thanks which kind of company for moving fossils around?

An airline: Qantas carried fossils around Australia for a touring Russian dinosaur exhibition in the 1990s, and sponsored digs in South America and Eastern Europe.

Leaellynasaura, a small Australian dinosaur described in 1989, was named by the couple who discovered it after whom?

Their daughter, Leaellyn Rich, is the namesake. The animal lived in the far south: in its day the Victorian coast where it was found lay inside the Antarctic Circle.

Which name did Henry Fairfield Osborn give in 1905 to a second skeleton that proved to be Tyrannosaurus rex?

Dynamosaurus imperiosus lasted only a year: in 1906 Osborn recognised that both skeletons were one species and chose Tyrannosaurus as the name to keep.

Zuniceratops, a plant-eater from New Mexico with the species name christopheri, was discovered in 1996 by whom?

An eight-year-old boy, Christopher Wolfe, made the find. He was the son of a palaeontologist, and the species name christopheri records his discovery.

Borogovia, a small predatory dinosaur from Mongolia, takes its name from creatures in a nonsense poem by which author?

Lewis Carroll's 'borogoves' come from Jabberwocky, the poem in Through the Looking-Glass. The dinosaur itself is known only from the two lower legs of a single animal.

What were the very first dinosaurs of the Triassic most likely like, judging by the oldest known skeletons?

Small and two-legged is the picture the oldest skeletons give: nimble meat-eaters. They were bit players at first, a small minority of the animals found at one famous Argentine site.

Which early dinosaur from Argentina, described in 1993 by Paul Sereno's team, has a name meaning 'dawn plunderer'?

Eoraptor was found in 1991, and both halves of its name are descriptions: 'dawn' for how primitive it is, 'plunderer' for its grasping hands.

Herrerasaurus, among the earliest dinosaurs, honours Victorino Herrera, who found its fossils while working as what?

A goatherd in the Andes, Herrera spotted the bones in outcrops near the city of San Juan. A nearly complete skeleton with a skull did not turn up until 1988.

Argentina's Ischigualasto park, whose rocks hold some of the oldest known dinosaurs, is better known by which nickname?

Valley of the Moon, or Valle de la Luna, describes its moon-like scenery. The name first appeared in print in 1943, in a publication of Argentina's automobile club.

Which animal, known from an arm bone and some vertebrae collected in the 1930s, may be the earliest known dinosaur?

Nyasasaurus was not formally described until 2013, when a study dated it to about 243 million years ago, 10 to 15 million years older than any dinosaur described before.

Which long-necked plant-eater of Late Triassic Europe is among the best-known dinosaurs, with over 100 skeletons found?

Plateosaurus probably means 'broad lizard', though it is often mistranslated as 'flat lizard'. A single clay pit in Germany yielded up to 50 of the skeletons.

A skull of the small early dinosaur Coelophysis was taken where in January 1998?

Into orbit aboard the shuttle Endeavour, with a stop on the Mir station, made Coelophysis the second dinosaur in space, after Maiasaura.

Mbiresaurus, one of Africa's earliest known dinosaurs, was dug up on expeditions in 2017 and 2019 in which country?

Zimbabwe's Mbire district gave the animal its name. Mbiresaurus was an early member of the line that later produced the giant long-necked sauropods.

The Carnian Pluvial Episode, a climate shift in which the earliest dinosaurs diversified, brought far more of what?

Rainfall soared as volcanic activity warmed the planet, and the arid Triassic world turned briefly hot and humid. Pluvial simply means rainy.

Tawa, an early meat-eating dinosaur found at Ghost Ranch in New Mexico, is named after the Puebloan god of what?

The sun god's name comes from the Hopi language. The species name, hallae, honours Ruth Hall, who founded the palaeontology museum at Ghost Ranch.