For more than 140 million years, dinosaurs were among the dominant land animals on Earth. Thousands of species lived and died across all climates and environments and on every landmass, evolving a spectacular diversity of sizes and shapes that scientists are still uncovering today. The National Museum of Natural History’s curator of Dinosauria, paleontologist Matthew Carrano, explores what life was like for dinosaurs in these ecosystems.
While T. rex is often compared to big apex predators like lions and tigers, and Triceratops to herd-dwelling herbivores like buffalo and wildebeest, the world of the Mesozoic Era was more complicated than that. With their enormous range of sizes and shapes, some dinosaurs did things that aren’t yet understood—and they didn’t do things that might otherwise be expected. And dinosaurs had a key distinction with wide-ranging implications: They laid eggs.
Carrano delves into what bizarre dinosaurs like short-armed Mononykus and scoop-toothed Masiakasaurus were actually up to; why there were no dinosaur moles, squirrels, bats, primates, or whales; and how young T. rex and adult Nanotyrannus might have coexisted as he discusses what scientists know, don’t know, and hope to learn about the ecology of dinosaurs.
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