Into The Future

Our understanding of dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals is constantly changing. At one time, pterodactyls were thought to have been incapable of flying. It was believed that these winged reptiles could do little more than hug the sides of cliffs hoping for a wind strong enough to move them. Recent evidence is now suggesting that pterodactyls were quite good flyers and that they flew with their hind limbs tucked up their bodies like birds.

Similarly, the once thought to be solitary Tyrannosaurus now appears to have lived in social groups, at least for part of the species life.

Ideas about how dinosaurs moved and behaved are also changing. Look in an older dinosaur book and you’ll read that Sauropods were too heavy to support their own weight, having to stick to swamps to keep from collapsing. Yet, with modern Technology, it now appears that Sauropod limbs were about as strong as those of elephants and certainly strong enough to support their own body weight on flat land. Some scientists speculate that Sauropods could even stand up on their back legs to reach higher leaves and twigs. Other scientists dispute the idea, claiming that such a posture would have raised the Sauropods heads too far above their hearts causing bad circulation. A recent analysis suggests that the blood pressure of a Sauropod would have been twice that of a giraffe. The truth is no one knows for sure how the large Sauropods coped with high blood pressure.

On and ending note, there is much information about many species of dinosaurs that remains unknown and could be solved in the future.