I like dinosaurs, do you like dinosaurs?

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Anybody here with dinosaur obsessions?
I really love dinosaurs, I always have, they are amazing.

My favourite dinosaur is the parasaurolophus. For Christmas I got the Fully Illustrated Dinosaur Encyclopedia and it's amazing ahh I love it! I have spent hours memorizing the parasauralophus page. Sauropods in general are really cool.

Parasaurolophus were about 35-40 feet long and the crest of a male was about 6 feet long and weighed about 2 tons and was about 9 feet tall at the hips and they are found in western North America. The crest was likely used to make sounds, to alert the herd to danger and to use as a mating call. Males had much larger crests than females. Parasaurolophus was an ornithopod. Its intelligence was average for a dinosaur. Ornithischian dinosaurs had hips shaped similarly to bird hips, hence the name. Ironically, it was the lizard-hipped dinosaurs, called Saurischians, that evolved into birds. Ornithischian hips were shaped so that both the ilium and the pubis faced backwards, leaving more room for the digestive system, as digesting plant matter was more difficult.






What would you like to share about dinosaurs? I like dinosaurs.
Dinosaurs dinosaurs dinosaurs... everything is good when you're talking about dinosaurs. !

i love dinosaurs, always loved them. since i was little.
got a website too, but its outdated and neglected for a long time.

My favourite is the dracorex right now.

Coincidentally, parasaurolophus was also my favorite dinosaur when I was young, closely followed by deinonychus<---Yep, I liked raptors before they became cool

Interestingly, wikipedia gives the largest estimated dinosaur possibly as amphicoelias. Unfortunately, the remains were fairly incomplete and were lost a century ago, so the estimate is pretty crudely just assuming it had the same proportions as dioplodocus (amphicoelias being a diplodocoid); this estimate yields a mind bending 190 feet long.

Another interesting thing is the classification of the dromaeosaurs. It has recently been suggested based on the observation that velociraptors had quill knobs on their bones (such features being exclusively associated with flying birds nowadays) that in fact the raptors may be secondarily flightless, and hence flightless birds rather than dinosaurs (although cladistically the distinction isn't that strong as birds are just a kind of therapod anyway).

Yay, people who actually talk about dinosaurs with me!!

Deinonychus is also one of my favourites, especially because of its extreme intelligence - so you can imagine how much I loove troodon!

Dromaeosaurs are very close to birds, and the line between flightless bird and dinosaur is very close... Although eoalulavis is probably the first true bird, as it was the first organism in the dinosaur-bird evolutionary timeline to have an alula!

parasaurolophus is my favorite.

Sure dinosaurs are cool. I am not the obsessed with dinosaurs however.

I used to go to the Natural History Museum in London every year for my birthday - I loved seeing all of those dinosaur skeletons. I went there for the first time in years in 2006, and I'm sure my friend was indulging me to the best of her ability as I almost bounced off the walls in sheer joy at seeing them (and I shall be going back there next weekend for the Darwin exhibition, so I shall have to steel myself and not regress to being five again).

And when I went to Chicago in 2007 for a comic convention, I went to the Field Museum to see "Sue", the most complete Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton ever found. I think it's quite telling that I took more photos of Sue than I did of the convention - and considering that the convention was filled with incredibly sexy girls parading around in extremely revealing costumes, I think that's saying something

My trip to San Diego last year also featured a visit to a museum to see dinosaur skeletons, and I was again amazed at how many more fossils they had in their dinosaur section than the Natural History Museum does... but that only came afterwards, when I was finished beaming like a fool at all the awesome bones

I likeplesiosaurs, other wise known as the lochness monster, or lake monsters. I think they are amazing.

Dinosaurs have been one of my interests in my life, I used to have a bunch of books on dinosaurs so I would know a lot. Though I have found out that a bunch of them are out of date, one fact being that some like the velociraptor are now belived to have had feathers and apparently are described if we saw it nowdays it would probably look like a strange bird to us. I remember when I lived in Darwin for a time they had a dinosaur exhibition at the museum and there were life sized models of dinosaurs and stuff, much more interesting then the ship exhibition. I also found some interesting theories that they thought that certain dinosaurs like the T-rex changed from I think it was warm blooded to cold blooded or something like that at an age from apparent different bone density from the skeletons. I used to obsessed with the Jurassic park movies, though I do know quite a lot about the mistakes they have in the movies like the velociraptors being actualy quite small instead there being another one about that size (its name meant terrible claw). I think my favirout was Kronosaurus, though I don't know if that counts as a dinosaur.

to all the parasaurolophus lovers, you guys know that this is THE only dinosaur, we can HEAR?*
i got some audio files on my computer somewhere, but theyre easily found on research sites.

they recreated the crest, filled out the cracks, and pushed air through it, making a powerfull prehistoric trombone-ish sound. very awesome

*not counting living birds obviously

Deinonychus was I believe the model on which the movie based its raptor, the term "velociraptor" having been used under a now defunct classification which put velociraptor and deinonychus into the same genus. However, deinonychus was only about the size of a person and was maybe around 3-4 feet tall (in contrast to turkey sized velociraptor), making it too small for the movie's depiction as well. The animal which would best fit the bill for a "big" raptor would be the dromaeosaur Utahraptor, which the raptor in the movie was not based on (as it was discovered later), although Utahraptor at around six and a half feet tall and twenty feet long, was maybe a bit too big.

Jurassic park was riddled with irksome inaccuracies like that. The most flagrant is the depiction of dilophosaurus as a small animal when in fact it was around 20 feet long, and as one of the larger predators of its time it probably didn't need any kind of venom or an intimidation frill.

Kronosaurus was not in fact a dinosaur.

One of my favorite enigmas is something they have at the Museum of Natural History in NYC: Dinocheirus. Known only by a set of massive arms (about 8 feet long!), it was clearly a therapod, probably an ornithomimosaur. With arms that big, the only that can be said for certain was it was freakin huge, as much as 10 tons.

pterodactyls are cool (the flying raptorlike ones)

i dont think deinocheirus is that much of an "enigma". it is only GIGANTIC if you compare it to dinosaurs w proportionally smaller arms than others, precisely such as ornithomimosaurs. even if it was an ornithomimosaur, i refuse to imagine this animal w the same proportions as ornithomimus or gallimimus. it physically wouldnt make sense. the arms must have been proportionally larger, maybe like that of oviraptorids or therizinosaurs, or closer to those anyway, proportion wise. and thus, cutting its weight by at least half.

there are other examples of eager judgements like that, such as "bruhathkayosaurus" a tibia or femur from a titanosaur, normal sized for titanosaurids, but misclassified as a "carnosaur" and thus, it was, for a short period, the most ultragigantic carnosaur known to mankind.

actually, if you look at older dinosaur books, therizinosaurus was also portrayed as a super-gigantic animal, because hey often reconstructed it w a body-arm ratio similar to allosaurus and other such theropods, you can imagine what a beast that would make of it

From some old message I recalled reading a while back, while Michael Crichton was working on his novel for Jurassic Park, he refered to a book about theropods, by paleontologist Gregory S. Paul called 'Predatory Dinosaurs of the World". In the book, Greg Paul places Deinonychus antirrhopus under the genus Velociraptor after arguing for morphological similarities. So I guess that's how it all started.

Anyways, I'm new to the site and I thought I was going to be the only person on the thread liking dinosaurs and thinking about being a paleontologist. Rock on, I'll be posting some paleoart of mine soon.

I love dinosaurs. Just bought another book on 'em, if only I had the time to read it.

The Amsterdam Zoo has a Deinonychus skeleton, but it is labeled as "Velociraptor antirrhopus." I emailed them to say that they got their classification wrong, that "Velociraptor antirrhopus" is outdated, and they replied saying thanks. But when I went to see it later they still hadn't changed the sign. Oh well, their loss.

My favourite dinosaur is Velociraptor, not the Jurassic Park kind (Utahraptor really), but the real, smaller kind. With feathers of course. I imagine it looked pretty cute but before you'd have time to say "aww" you'd be dead.