It’s one of those topics that appeal to all ages but unfortunately, we’ll never quite know the true history about dinosaurs.
We’ve got to a point where we are now almost certain they existed, and some of the unanswered questions are starting to get clarified somewhat. However, there will always be holes, which is the case for anything that happened so long ago.
At the same time, with the information we do know, we can start to debunk some of the common myths that blight this topic. Today we have collected six of them, and through the course of this post we will put them to bed for good.
“Dinosaurs were the First Reptiles on Earth”
We’ve seen the movies, but let’s put this first myth to bed as a matter of urgency. Sure, dinosaurs are historic, and happened to grace our earth over 230 million years ago.
There was plenty that happened before that time, though. Reptiles existed in the Carboniferous period, which is understood to have been around 300 million years ago. In other words, dinosaurs certainly weren’t the first by any stretch of the imagination.
“Dinosaurs Ruled the Food Chain”
If one takes a look at this resource it would be hard to dismiss this next myth, with some dinosaurs having the bite force equivalent of 13 grand pianos.
The keyword to note in the above paragraph is “some”. Not all dinosaurs were equal and sure, if we hone in on a classic, the T-Rex was well and truly top of the food chain. There were plenty of smaller dinosaurs that didn’t fall into this category though, and were eaten up by non-dinosaur predators.
“Dinosaurs Strode Hand-in-hand Together”
OK, perhaps they didn’t stroll hand-in-hand together, but this next myth is all about how they supposedly were based at the same time, and same place. The former might be correct, but not all dinosaurs lived in the same area of the world.
Let’s coin two of the most famous creatures, the T-Rex and Spinosaurus. It may have made a great movie, but there’s no way in which these two crossed paths. The T-Rex was from North America, while the Spinosaurus lived in middle Cretaceous Africa.
“Nothing Descended from Dinosaurs”
We can only rely on science for this next point, but fossils seem to suggest that a lot of the birds that we see in modern-day life actually derived from dinosaurs. In fact, there are closer connotations with many of these birds rather than some reptiles that now walk on our planet.
Which birds are we referring to? Chickens and pigeons surprisingly have a lot of features that are said to have come from dinosaurs.
“A Meteor Killed all Dinosaurs Instantly”
This is probably one of the more controversial myths that we are going to talk about, as nobody is ever going to know about the real reasons which caused dinosaurs to become extinct.
There is certainly a lot of legs to the theory about a meteor hitting the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico and causing their demise, but this is unlikely to have been instant. Many believe that it was probably thousands of years later that the effects from this were truly felt, and dinosaurs eventually starved to death.
“Dinosaurs Lived at the Same Time as Humans”
We’ll leave this one to the end, as it’s bordering on the ridiculous.
The cartoons might suggest otherwise, but dinosaurs walked on our planet tens of millions of years ago. Humans have been around for just a fraction of this time, with even the most generous of studies suggesting that they have only existed for around 200,000 years. There’s no way in which the two walked together.
