Help me learn more about dinosaurs, please.

As a pre-teen, I loved dinosaurs and kept up with paleontology. That was almost twenty years ago, and recently I realized that a lot of my information is tragically out of date. For example, I recently found out that T. rex hatchlings had a downy coat that fell off as they matured, that stygimoloch and dracorex may actually be juvenile or female pachycephalosaurs, and that pachycephalosaurs didn't actually but heads like mountain goats as we thought.

I'd like to get back into the dinosaur scene, but don't know where to start looking. Does anyone know of a good book I could check out to get up to speed? Preferably something with accurate illustrations that reflect recent discoveries. I'd really appreciate it.

Thanks in advance. :)

I don't know of any specific books myself, but this site has a rather large section of Useful Notes on Dinosaurs and other prehistoric life in it. That might be a good place to start.

This one is more comprehensive

This one is cheaper and easier to read but just as accurate.

One of the bigger recent discoveries is that a lot of dinosaurs actually had feathers their whole life.

Yup. As is the even more recent discovery that Spielberg and his scientific advisors for the first Jurassic Park knew about that fact, or at best, had strong suspicions, and sat on them as feathered dinosaurs would have not been believable to Joe Cinemagoer.

Modern birds are a type of dinosaur as well, in fact, the prehistoric dinosaurs are more similar to modern birds than they are to modern reptiles (or at least the theropod dinosaurs, if I remember correctly). So all those cartoons that show dinosaur meat as resembling a chicken leg are Accidentally Accurate.

edited 29th Feb '12 1:24:18 PM by Rainbow

@ De Marquis: niiice! Thank you! Yikes, that top one looks delightful, but I don't think it's smart to buy it yet... I might have to wait a couple weeks.

@ Midgetsnowman: that I knew. It was a little disappointing at first, but the more I think about it, the more "at peace" I am with the concept.

@ Ham H 70: Crap, really? That's disappointing. I still regard Jurassic Park as one of the best science-fiction films ever made, and it sucks to learn that Spielberg and co. could actually have given it a longer shelf life but chose not too. There's talk that he's planning a new JP trilogy; I hope he updates the dinosaurs' looks by the time they come out.

Yup, really. Like the even better known bit that he knew, because his pet paleontologists told him, that the raptors (the quite terrifying so-called Velociraptors) he used in the film were the size of chickens. He quite deliberately scaled them up so that they would be a fit opponent for the T-Rex. Even though there WERE other raptor species out there and whose bones had been found that were the size of the movie's real stars, the Deinonychus. Which doesn't sound as cool as velociraptor, eh?

Still, hands-down the best dino movie ever made, though, and from what was widely available at the time, reasonably accurate.

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Personally,. I think feathered dinos are cooler. It solves a lot of the annoying issues with dinosaur biology, plus makes evolution naysayers case look even less plausible when they cant say "well, why did the dinosaurs evolve into tiny featheres animals from big leather animals?"