Dinosaur facts you’ve probably never heard before

It’s the longest generic name for any dinosaur so far. It means “small thick-headed lizard”. The fact that it has the longest name is a bit ironic given that it’s one of the smallest and shortest dinosaurs found at only 1 meter long.

It was a small dinosaur that existed during the late Cretaceous period and it was only a few feet in length. It’s not of the bird family despite its look and is best known for a weird feature which is having freakishly short arms that have these weird little claws at the end of them.

It’s long been known that most dinosaurs didn’t look like this. With a sort of leathery skin similar to a lizard. Instead, most dinosaurs had feathers covering their entire bodies. It is been proven that the T-rex had feathers but it could not fly.

It existed during the middle to late Triassic period and it is so weird looking that it almost seems like an evolutionary mistake. It is the only glider that evolved a membrane on its pelvis instead of its pectoral girdle which is just a fancy way of saying it grew wings on its legs instead of its arms.

The definition of what is and isn’t a dinosaur is a bit complicated and usually involves various anatomical differences. What you need to know is that around 252 million years ago there was an extinction event called the “Great Dying”. This event killed almost everything. It is the most severe of all of the major mass extinctions, killing up 96% of all species on the planet. This event marked the beginning of the Mesozoic Era.

It would until the next extinction event that occurred around 66 million years ago. This marked the end of this era. Almost every egg-laying, land-dwelling, reptilian creature that existed during this period is a dinosaur with a few exceptions. This means that sea creatures and flying animals from the Mesozoic Era are not dinosaurs but instead regarded as marine and flying reptiles.