Dinosaur Myths

Despite what you may have seen in any number of B movies, dinosaurs and cavemen did not coexist. Dinosaurs have been extinct for 65 million years, whereas our earliest hominid ancestors only date back about 6 million years.

Believe it or not, dinosaurs' closest living modern-day relatives are not lizards, but birds. Based on their skeletal structure and egg-laying strategies, paleontologists theorize that birds either evolved from certain species of dinosaurs, or at the very least shared a common ancestor. Fossil evidence has also shown that some dinosaurs had feathers, although it is not clear whether they could fly.

While the impact of a huge asteroid colliding with Earth may be largely responsible for the extinction of many dinosaurs, the results were not instantaneous and there were a number of other contributing factors. The aftereffects of the asteroid impact included cataclysmic earthquakes, tsunamis, acid rain and a dust cloud that may have blocked the sun for months or even years, causing significant global climate change. Some paleontologists believe that the dinosaurs would have died out even without the asteroid, due to climate change caused by shifting continents and falling sea levels.

Technically, dinosaurs are four-legged land animals. The group of flying reptiles known as Pterosaurs with which dinosaurs coexisted were close relatives, but are not considered true dinosaurs.

Dinosaurs roamed the earth for more than 180 million years, and the various species did not all exist at the same time. By the time T. rex came along, Stegosaurus had been extinct for nearly 80 million years.

If that were true, don't you think someone would have done it by now? The science behind the novel/movie Jurassic Park sounds pretty good in theory, but in reality, there are far too many conditions that are nearly impossible to meet in order to make it work. How do you know the insect bit a dinosaur? How do you only extract the dino DNA and not the insect's? How do you sequence the dino genome? How do you find a host for an extinct species? The list goes on ...