My daughter’s favorite was also Triceratops. “Because it has my name in it.”
Team Triceratops here. In fact my 5-year-old son will now yell “Mom! Your favorite dinosaur!” whenever he sees one in a book or wherever and I am forced to come admire it to his satisfaction.
He says that the deinonychus is pretty much what the velociraptor should have been (in Jurassic Park) but without the cooler name, but a few minutes ago, didn’t he say that it was a mid sized predator, when the raptors in Jurassic Park were a lot smaller than that?
Deinonychus was mid-sized. The dromaeosaurs in JP were large (i.e., human-sized or larger). TYrannosaurs and sauropods and allosaurs and most ceratopsians and stegosaurs and ankylosaurs and hadrosaurs were “freakin’ huge”.
Were there even velociraptors before Jurassic Park? I don’t remember them from my dinosuar studies as a child, and for some reason I’ve always believed they were made up for the movie. Of course, Pluto was still a planet when I was a kid…
But doesn’t he say that deinonychus could fight apatosauruses easily? They seem a little small for that.
Must have been - Pachycephalosaurus were 4-5 metres long (largest of the family).
Stegoceras, on the other hand, were about 2m long, and had, proportionately, much smaller heads. (Seriously…look at the tiny melon on that thing…it’s positively pinheaded!)
Velociraptors were discovered in the 20s, and a specimen of (what appears to be) a raptor in battle with a protoceratops has been pretty iconic since it was discovered in 1971. (There’s some debate about just who’s the defender in the fight, if it was, in fact, a fight - it’s usually presented as the raptor attacking the protoceratops for food, but some theorize the raptor’s a female trying to keep the protoceratops from trampling her eggs.)
And T. Rex is nowhere near the coolest dinosaur. It’s not even the coolest large therapod (that’d be the Spinosaurus).
My favourites are the duckbills, especially the ones with big crests. Parasaurolophus and Lambeosaurus, particularly.
It’s T-Rex all the way and not Triceratops as the girls seem to like (and anyone who votes for Triceratops over T-Rex is a girl regardless of what their genitals might say). There is nothing that those jaws could not consume. With jaws like that who needs arms?
If the T-Rex had lived until today would it’s arms have evolved out of existence through lack of usefulness?
There is no other answer!
Damn right. Welcome to the winning team. T-Rex, bitches.
If he did say that, he was wrong, regardless how big Deinonychus was – Apatosaurus lived about 35-40 million years before Deinonychus.
Hmm, so many ways to answer this thread…
Should I go with: Eww sick, I’m calling Rule 34 on this thread.
or…
Dinobots, bitches.
My Dove brand cucumber-and-green-tea scented antiperspirant says otherwise buddy!
Wait…I mean…
I could never really get into T-Rex, because one of my favorite movies as a kid was The Land Before Time, and T-Rex was just a little too scary.
I like the great big sauropods, like Supersaurus and the little-known Amphicoelias, because they’re, well, so big. Like estimated at thirty feet tall and 200 feet long big.
But my favorite character in The Land Before Time was Spike, so I’m gonna go ahead and cast my vote for the noble Stegosaurus. He’s spiky, but a pacifist at heart. And when I was a kid, my dad told me great time-travel stories which included ‘spike-tails’.
Actually, in my little kids book of dinos, I thought the Allosaurus was cooler than the T-Rex, even though smaller.
When I was growing up, dinosaurs were not the thing that excited kids. That didn’t seem to be a big deal until much later. Jurassic Park sent it into the stratosphere, but it was starting to bubble under just beforehand.
A friend-of-a-friend was a stop motion animator, who made a series of short clips about dinosaurs that aired on local TV around 1989, and it was interesting that he made his T-Rex stand upright and drag its tail, just as it was popularly portrayed elsewhere. It’s a shame that Jurassic Park came along very soon after and showed him up a little. He works for Weta now (he designed some of the dinosaurs in King Kong).
Anyway, I always liked the Stegosaurus.
Deinonychus was my favourite until it was discovered that they had feathers, now they look like attack chickens.
In the Big Book of Dinosaurs we had when I was a child, there was a rather graphic and scary (to a preschooler) 2-page illustration of a Triceratops in battle with a T-Rex–stabbing it in the abdomen with its two long horns. When I was little, I thought that this was a representation of an actual historical fight, that fossils had been found this way or something.
My mom painted a mural of it on my big brother’s bedroom wall, with a pteradon flying overhead and two little turtles down in the corner by the door. Brontosaurus was on another wall. When we left that house years later, we couldn’t bear to paint over them, and put up paneling. Unless a subsequent owner of the house has taken down the paneling, they are there still.
I’m with Ellen Cherry! There’s a Pterodactyl mounted above Sue at the Chicago Field Museum. Awesome.
No.
This is, of course, the correct answer.