Holding Hands with Dinosaurs

Miami museum Maiasaurus - the 'mother' dinosaur, an image we find comforting.

The fact that dinosaurs are long extinct adds to their intrigue. Like a murder hunt it needs careful forensic work to unlock the secrets of how they walked, ate and bred. Fossil evidence tells us that like most other reptiles and birds the dinosaurs built nests and laid eggs. The remains of nests and newly hatched plant eating dinosaurs have been found in Montana in the USA. Layer upon layer of fossilised nests in the Gobi Desert suggest that the dinosaurs returned to the same nesting sites year after year. Nests, young helpless chicks and caring parents all are images that we find familiar and comforting. It reassures us that even a creature as strange and alien as a dinosaur was capable of the nurturing, social behaviour that we find so reassuring and essential in our own lives.

There is also the vexed question of whether dinosaurs were cold or warm blooded. Reptiles are cold but birds are warm blooded. But again, short of cloning a modern dinosaur from ancient original DNA molecules (as portrayed in Michael Crichton brilliant book "Jurassic Park" later turned into a Hollywood block buster by Steven Spielberg) we can never know the absolute truth. But perhaps the greatest mystery of all is how they became extinct. What force of nature was so powerful that it managed to kill off the most successful group of animals of all time? Theories about their demise range from asteroid impact, rising sea levels to today’s main contender: massive volcanic eruptions. Read our previous article "Extinction!" which points to an intriguing balance of all three factors. Whatever killed them must have been catastrophic. A highly successful group of animals that roamed the Earth for over 150 million years, more than seventy times longer than humans, were wiped off the surface of the planet forever.

Paul Sereno It may have been small but the Eoraptor had razor sharp teeth.

A whole branch of scientific study has grown up around the study of dinosaur fossils. An even bigger entertainment industry has jumped on to a bandwagon quite literally 'full of old bones'. Palaeontologists may have been highly imaginative in the way they have built exotic creatures from fossil fragments but the producers of the highly acclaimed television series ‘Walking With Dinosaurs’ have taken it much further by personalising and humanising these ancient leviathans wherever possible.