National Dinosaur Day is on June 1 each year. To celebrate, The Sun enlisted the help of Prof. Warren Allmon, earth and atmospheric sciences, and Dr. Brendan Anderson, an earth and atmospheric sciences professor at SUNY Oneonta. Both are paleontologists from the Paleontological Research Institution and spoke with The Sun to answer readers’ dinosaur questions on just about everything — hot takes, feathers, intelligence and, of course, sex.
Ready to dive into the dinosaur world? Let’s go!
Are birds really dinosaurs?
“Birds are dinosaurs. Period,” said Anderson. “The passenger pigeon is a dinosaur…A dinosaur-shaped chicken nugget is [made of] a dinosaur.”
So what’s the deal with feathers?
“We know that many of them had feathers. So, that’s no longer fantasy. There’s data for that,” said Allmon. “We actually know a little bit about the color of the feathers.”
“Feathers have two kinds of colors. They have structural color, which is iridescence, like a hummingbird. And then they have pigment, [which is] held in tiny bodies called melanosomes…so if you find really well-preserved fossil feathers, sometimes you can detect these melanosomes and reconstruct what the pigments may have been.”
How can scientists tell female and male dinosaurs apart?
“When some dinosaurs are preparing to make eggshells, they lay down a special bone [medullary bone], so if you find that special bone [in the fossil], you know that it’s a female,” said Anderson. “Usually if there’s a big version and a small version of a [vertebrate] species, usually the big version is the female because eggs take more [energy] to produce. That’s a general pattern that is true in a lot of living animals that are vertebrates. So if we find a big and a small version of a species, the assumption is that usually the small shell is probably the male.”
How do we know what dinosaurs sounded like? Are they realistically portrayed in Jurassic Park?
“A lot of that [in Jurassic Park] was fictional,” explained Anderson. “They mixed animals and mechanical sounds.”
For example, the Velociraptors are voiced by penguins and toucans, and the Dimorphodon is voiced by baby brown pelicans. Other dinosaur sounds used a mixture of living animal noises from alligators, elephants, tigers and tortoises, along with bird recordings provided by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.
But for some dinosaurs like Parasaurolophus, which has a big tube connected to its nose, scientists can look at animals today that also have resonating chambers to help figure out what they sounded like.
“[Scientists] take a CT of the skull and say, if air passes through this structure, what does it sound like?” said Anderson.
So by using CT scans and comparative anatomy, scientists can model how air would move through the skull and see what kinds of sounds and echoes that structure could produce, helping reconstruct the types of vocalizations the dinosaur may have made, Anderson added.
Hot take: Jurassic Park will happen within 50 years.
“The bad news is that DNA is a very fragile molecule,” said Allmon. “It does not preserve easily at all.”
The oldest known DNA recovered to date is around 2 million years old, while dinosaurs went extinct around 66 million years ago. Although the film suggests that dinosaur DNA was preserved in amber, studies have shown that DNA does not ‘survive’ for the length of time in amber, as the genetic material has degraded far beyond the possibility of scientific recovery.
As a result, serious discussions about de-extincting organisms like the woolly mammoth (which went extinct 4,000 years ago) or the dire wolf (13,000 years ago) would not happen with the dinosaurs.
“There’s no evidence that [dinosaur de-extinction] could happen,” said Allmon. “Though amber is amazing, it doesn’t preserve [ ancient DNA that long], or at least not that we have found … Jurassic Park for really old things is not possible.”
How did dinosaurs have sex? How do they have babies?
“Dinosaurs only reproduce by eggs,” said Allmon. “So how did dinosaurs do it? Well, if dinosaurs are the ancestors of birds, then probably they did a cloacal kiss.”
“The male gets on top of the female and … they tuck their tail in between the tail feathers of the female and their cloaca, which is this common opening of the urogenital and digestive tract and they just touch like this. It takes like a second, and the sperm is transferred.”
“[However], some birds do have penises and some birds do [reproduce through] intramissions,” said Anderson. “So different dinosaurs might have different sexual reproductive processes.”
According to both Allmon and Anderson, at the end of the day, dinosaur reproduction remains largely an educated guess from paleontologists, who infer the behavior and process by comparing dinosaurs with their closest living relatives: birds and crocodilians. Direct evidence from fossil records is lacking because reproductive organs, such as penises, are composed of soft tissue that would have rotted away before being able to mineralize into rock.
So how did the T. rex do the deed without crushing each other?
“Carefully,” said Anderson. “It’s a joke…[but] elephants do successfully mate so you can get to several tons and still work this out…There’s a paper that came out recently about injuries received during mating for hadrosaurs… these would be injuries you’d expect by something [big in size] that was mounting the other.”
Were dinosaurs a social species? Or did they just mate and leave?
Just like modern birds have different social behaviors, dinosaurs probably had different social behaviors too, explained Allmon.
“First of all, there are bone beds of dinosaurs that contain not just a couple of dinosaurs, but thousands of skeletons, suggesting that maybe they lived in high numbers together,” said Allmon. “Second, they nested together. There are a couple of instances where a large number of nests have been found together. Third, there’s evidence from trackways that lots of [dinosaurs] of the same species move together.”
How did scientists figure out how fast a T. rex runs?
“There was a famous study that compared T. rex to a chicken because the chicken is a bipedal dinosaur,” said Allmon. “So [scientists] looked at the muscle mass on a chicken and [estimated] how much muscle T. rex had through reconstructing the muscles by looking at the muscle scars. Then they [studied] the motion.”
After using a structural model and movement analysis, the study’s researchers proposed that T. rex likely traveled around 11 miles per hour, similar to modern elephants.
Research models suggest that for T. rex to run at the previously inferred speed of 30 to 40 mph, like the jeep scene in Jurassic Park, nearly 43% of its body weight would need to be devoted to leg-supporting muscles alone. Scientists consider this estimate to be highly unrealistic, accounting for the distribution room and weight needed for other muscles, vital organs and skeletons.
Were Stegosaurus really the dumbest dinosaurs?
“It is true that Stegosaurus had a very small brain for its body size…the famous walnut size,” said Allmon, “But we don’t know, because they had enough to eat, to have sex, to reproduce. That’s enough. And they did really well.”
What does it mean when someone calls me a “dinosaur?”
“If you call somebody a dinosaur, you’re usually not complimenting them,” said Allmon. "You’re calling them dumb, or they should be extinct, or they are from long ago.”
This idea of “dumbness” or “stupidity” of dinosaurs reflects the long-held belief that dinosaurs were thought of as animals that were not well-adapted and were fated for extinction, continued Allmon. Groundbreaking research in 1980, however, revealed that it was not their inability to adapt, but rather an unforeseeable natural disaster, a massive asteroid, that caused the extinction.
Allmon suggests, based on this information, that if someone wants to insult others by calling them dumb, they should use a term other than “dinosaur.”
