Field Journal← articles / catalogue
— field notes —
Essays on how dinosaurs lived, how the ancient continents drifted apart and what palaeontologists have managed to find out.
— field note No. 1 —
Twelve metres from snout to tail tip, a skull as long as a writing desk and teeth that crushed bone. Tyrannosaurus lived in western North America 68–66 million years ago, and its skeleton is better known than that of any other large predatory dinosaur. The bones say much less about its voice, colouring and habits, and that is where most of the guesswork lies.
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— field note No. 2 —
A cinema-goer who met a real Velociraptor wouldn’t recognise it. This predator came up to an adult’s knee: two metres long including the tail and half a metre tall at the hip. It was covered in feathers, too, even though it couldn’t fly. About all that survives of the screen version is the big curved claw on each hind foot.
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— field note No. 3 —
Ask a palaeontologist which dinosaur was the biggest and you’ll get a question back: longest, tallest or heaviest? Sauropods, the long-necked plant-eating giants, win all three contests. For sheer weight the names you hear most are Argentinosaurus and Patagotitan. Crowning a champion is hard, though. Many giants are known from a handful of bones, and the estimates are revised again and again.
Read the note →— field note No. 4 —
Sixty-six million years ago an asteroid about ten kilometres across slammed into a shallow sea off what is now Mexico. Dust blotted out the sky, plants were cut off from the light, and within a short time every dinosaur except the birds was gone. The birds hardly escaped unscathed either: many of their ancient groups did not survive the catastrophe.
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— field note No. 5 —
Few dinosaurs have had worse luck than Spinosaurus. Its first bones, found in Egypt, were destroyed in 1944, and its appearance had to be pieced together again over the decades that followed. The main points are now known. It lived in North Africa in the Cretaceous, had long, narrow jaws and a tall sail on its back, and fed on fish. Whether it caught them by swimming or by wading through the shallows is still argued over.
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— field note No. 6 —
Pteranodon turns up on boxes labelled “Dinosaurs”, and it has no business there. It is a pterosaur, from a separate branch of flying reptiles: close to the dinosaurs, but a branch of its own. Size, age and the ability to fly don’t decide who is related to whom. Ancestry and the build of the skeleton do.
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— field note No. 7 —
Three horns, a beak and a bony shield behind the head: even someone who can’t tell the Jurassic from the Cretaceous knows Triceratops on sight. This plant-eater, 8–9 metres long, lived in North America at the very end of the Cretaceous, side by side with Tyrannosaurus. What it looked like is well established. Why it had horns and a frill, and how it behaved, is far less certain.
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— field note No. 8 —
Tyrannosaurus lived closer in time to us than to Stegosaurus. That’s not a joke, just arithmetic. The Mesozoic Era lasted about 186 million years and is split into three periods: the Triassic, the Jurassic and the Cretaceous. In that time the dinosaurs appeared, Pangaea broke apart, and the plants and animals of the world were replaced several times over.
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— field note No. 9 —
Take a look at a pigeon. It is a dinosaur, and its feathers are a family inheritance. Feather impressions and other traces of plumage have been found in many non-avian dinosaurs, and they help scientists work out what these animals looked like and where birds came from. Just don’t jump to conclusions: feathered is not the same as able to fly.
Read the note →— field note No. 10 —
Fit South America, Africa, Antarctica, Australia and the Indian subcontinent together like the shards of a broken plate and you have Gondwana. It began to come apart in the Jurassic, about 180 million years ago, and the break-up dragged on for more than a hundred million years: Australia and Antarctica finally parted company only after the dinosaurs had died out. As the land drifted apart, so did the animals living on it.
Read the note →Reading the rocks
A dinosaur fossil forms when remains or traces survive long enough to become part of the geological record. For a bone, burial and mineral-rich groundwater often do the preserving. For a footprint, the crucial event is keeping an impression intact. Neither process preserves a complete account of the animal’s life.
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Time in a rock layer
Scientists usually date a dinosaur by establishing the age of the rocks around it. The order of layers gives a relative sequence; suitable minerals can provide numerical ages. Carbon-14 dating is useful for much younger remains, but its timescale is far too short for non-avian dinosaurs.
Read the note →The dinosaurs outside your window
Yes. Birds are living dinosaurs, specifically one branch of theropods. Saying that birds descended from dinosaurs is true, but it can suggest that they left the group. In evolutionary classification, descendants remain within the branches from which they evolved.
Read the note →Finding your way around Dinosauria
The main dinosaur groups are branches of a family tree, not size categories. Theropods include T. rex and birds; sauropods include long-necked giants; ornithischians include horned, duck-billed and armoured dinosaurs. “Flying dinosaur” and “sea dinosaur” often refer to animals outside Dinosauria.
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Before the first footstep
Dinosaur eggs reveal reproduction at a scale that adult skeletons cannot: shell structure, developing embryos and the arrangement of a clutch. All dinosaurs for which reproduction is known laid eggs. Yet an isolated fossil egg rarely tells us, by itself, which species laid it or how long a parent stayed nearby.
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Colour beyond the bones
Scientists have reconstructed aspects of colour in a small number of exceptionally preserved dinosaurs. Pigment-bearing structures and their distribution can reveal dark, reddish or iridescent coverings and body patterns. Most dinosaur fossils do not preserve that evidence, so a complete colour scheme often remains an artistic reconstruction.
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