Do you have a favorite dinosaur?

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Well...every kid loves the stegosaurus. The thing with big dragon like spines running along its back. But they have fallen out of fashion with grownups lately because they were not in the branch of dinosaurs related to the ancestors of birds. In fact I don't think that I have ever seen a stegosaurus in any teaser for the Jurassic Park movies ( The stegos lived in the Triassic, but most of the dinos in that movie were from the Cretatious so they mixed and matched in the movie).

I have to be really unoriginal and tell you my fave dinosaur is the dinonichus.

But I love all of them!!

I also like Nigersaurus.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigersaurus

Nigersaurus was a sauropod (I.E. "long-neck") which lived in Africa during the Cretaceous. It had a downturned mouth, which it used to eat grass. It had over 500 tiny teeth in its mouth. It would shed a tooth and grow a new one every 14 days.

Nigersaurus was one of the few dinosaurs to primarily feed on grass. This is because grass first evolved during the Cretaceous. These early grasslands were not as large as modern grasslands. Grasslands (and, by extention, grass-eating animals) only became common during the Neogene Period.

Evolution of Dinosaur Movies
VVV
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hxSws2W0-E

Another dinosaur that I like is Hesperornis.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hesperornis

Hesperornis is often considered to be a bird. Even that Wikipedia article describes it as a bird. Despite this, scholarly sources (including the ones cited by Wikipedia) make it very clear that this animal was not part of crown group Aves. It was part of the stem leading to birds, though this does not make it a bird. People should call this creature a birdlike feathered dinosaur in my opinion. We only call this thing a bird because some people still don't want to see the evolutionary connection between bird and dinosaur. If we are going to call Hesperornis a bird, then we need a stricter and more scientifically rigorous definition of what is and is not a bird.

Anyways, Hesperornis was convergently similar to penguins. Even among feathered dinosaurs, there was tremendous diversity.

The Hesperornithes clade went extinct at the end of the Cretaceous, along with other non-bird dinosaurs. In other words, there were some dinosaurs that were very close to birds on the tree of life, but still didn't make the cut.

Another dinosaur that I like is Pelagornis.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZkVBCgmZ_E

I find it odd how birds with serrated beaks have never evolved into flightless forms. A flightless bird with a serrated beak would be an incredibly effective predator.

This is another dinosaur that I like.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gastornis

Fun Fact: Gastornis means "Gaston's bird".

Perhaps this means that Gastornis was roughly the size of a barge, and ate four dozen eggs every morning!

What would a dinosaur taste like?

Chicken, maybe?

Imagine Sweet and Sour T Rex or Broiled Pterosaur with Wild Rice or Sauropod Stew.

Look at this little dinosaur. ^-^

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcL47Kiyuj0

I was big on the Pachycephalosaurus as a kid. The whole head butting battle thing was mega badass.

At the moment Rudy Giulianiosaurus, a living fossil that gives us great insight into life before the great increases in brain power mammals established.

Previously, Eoraptor, one of the first true dinosaurs and that’s the fascination: an animal that evolved so far it evolved into a completely new/different family. Not big on dinos though, I’m much more interested in the Carboniferous and Orodivician animals.

Stegosaurus

When I first got into dinosaurs, it was Stegosaurus. Then I saw Jurassic Park and switched to Velociraptor.