Interesting Dinosaur Facts

The word dinosaur comes from the Greek language. It means ‘terrible lizard’. People decided that these creatures should be called dinosaurs because they were so big. They were not really talking about how scary they looked.

This picture shows how big some dinosaurs were compared to a human.

People believe that dinosaurs were living on the earth until about 65 million years ago. Scientists think that the dinosaurs became extinct very quickly because of a big asteroid that might have fallen on the earth or because of a volcano erupting.

The asteroid theory The volcano theory

There were two main types of dinosaurs. The main difference in the 2 groups were the shape of their hip joints. Dinosaurs that had hips like lizards are called Saurischia. The other group had hips more like birds and they are called Ornithischia.

This picture shows an example of the two different types of dinosaurs and their hip bones.

Saurischia-lizard hippedSaurischia are divided into two main groups. 1. Theropods - They are the only meat-eating group of dinosaurs. They walked on three-toed bird like feet with sharp claws. They had powerful legs and short arms.2. Sauropods – these were lizard footed reptiles. They were the really large herbivores. They walked on all four feet, had small heads and long necks and tails.

A T-Rex is an example of a theropod.

A Diplodocus is an example of a sauropod.

Ornithischia - bird hippedAll of the dinosaurs in this group were herbivores. This means that they only ate plants. There were 2 main groups. They were the Thyreophora and the Cerapodgroups. The dinosaurs included in these groups were plated, armoured, and horned dinosaurs.

A triceratops belonged in the Ornithischiagroup.