Why dinosaurs are important

It is far from my intention to talk endlessly about dinosaurs on the Lost Worlds, but as a key part of my research and given the near endless public interest in them, they are going to keep coming up. I can assure readers that a more diverse set of posts will eventually turn up, but there are some good reasons to focus on the dinosaurs both in terms of this science in general and science communication in general, and that is worth dwelling on a little before I bore my readers with still more references to them.

For more information, please visit Are There Any Living Dinosaurs.

I'll start with the issues of communication, outreach and education. With the odd exception of the children of palaeontologists, I've yet to meet a child who is not interested in dinosaurs, or at least used to be interested in dinosaurs. When I have the time and an invitation, I do give talks in schools and similar venues on dinosaurs and palaeontology, and am generally treated to a wonderful display of interest and an unending stream of questions afterwards.

There's a good deal of anecdotal evidence for this popularity, from the cheap plastic dinosaur toys that never seem to go out of fashion, the endless range of dinosaur books aimed at youngsters that appear year on year, and any new dinosaur exhibition can guarantee a queue around the block of children eager to see the new discoveries. I won't pretend to know why, but kids really do love dinosaurs and the important thing is that they do. (And let's not forget that there's no little interest from a great many adults too).

That provides a fantastic hook and instant introduction for palaeontologists and educators to get kids involved and interested in science. They might come for the giant bones, but there are a lot of good reasons for them to stay. Short of university, few people are likely to get even a cursory formal introduction to palaeontology, geology and the like during their education and moreover some things are not likely to generate much interest.

Few kids will (I suspect) willingly pick up a book on geology, perhaps not even one on general palaeontology, but most will probably own a dinosaur book or two at some point that will have been avidly devoured. Most of the better ones (even those aimed at younger readers) cover at least a little of how fossils are formed, different rock formations, the age of the Earth and the like, and thus they will be presented with at least a little geological information and there will likely also be parts on relationships between groups and changes over time thus introducing ideas about evolution, taxonomy and extinction.

In short, dinosaurs provide a wonderful way of talking to a young audience about all manner of scientific ideas and showing how things like geochemistry and biology can come together. They can also provide a great frame of reference for discussing issues in palaeontology. There might be better examples in the fossil record when discussing one issue in palaeontology or another, but one can all but guarantee that a good example on dinosaurs will be recognised and understood by the audience.

This then makes dinosaurs a superb educational tool and thus one that I'd be using here even if I didn't work on them myself, but dinosaurs are also inherently worthy of research. Well OK, any branch of science is inherently worthy of investigation as indeed is any group of organisms. It's perhaps better to say that dinosaurs do offer us some opportunities in palaeontological research that other groups don't necessarily offer. Thus while I wouldn't call them more worthy than other fossil groups, they're also going to be of interest to researchers who don't specialise in dinosaurs.

The modern terrestrial world is considered to be dominated by the mammals and this has more or less been the case since the demise of the dinosaurs (birds aside) some 65 million years ago. On an apparently unrelated note, the further back in time you go, the worse the fossil record (generally) gets. But together this means that if you want to look at a terrestrial fossil fauna that is not dominated by mammals, or the evolution of a non-mammalian group over time, or to examine a major extinction event and restructuring of a terrestrial ecosystem, or how terrestrial animals responded to the break up of the continents etc, the obvious place to turn to is the era of the dinosaurs. More recently it's pretty much all mammals. Further back the data is more patchy.

Similarly, dinosaurs were around for a very long time, and so for any kind of study of evolutionary change or diversity over a long period of time, dinosaurs are going to be a good candidate. Coupled to the fact that birds are dinosaurs and we have the opportunity to study a truly incredible and important piece of evolutionary history &#; the origin of powered flight &#; and of course gain insights into the origins and changes of the birds (themselves an important and diverse group).

Dinosaurs also include the largest terrestrial animals of all time in their ranks and so provide interest for biomechanics, the evolution of large size, the structures of ecosystems and more.

Finally, dinosaurs have already attracted a lot of research interest over the years, which means we know more about them than many other groups. While this does then become a bit of a self fulfilling prophesy, it does make them a better group for still further research or more integrated projects than some other groups as we're starting from a more solid base of knowledge.

Thus dinosaurs provide some unique research opportunities as well as more "normal" palaeontological research. Either way, though, their enduring popularity makes them a key part of the arsenal of the science educator. Kids love them and as such they are an ideal way of introducing children to other areas of science, especially those perceived to be "unsexy" or that might otherwise be overlooked.

I make no apology for my own love of dinosaurs, but I'd also be silly not to exploit their charisma and the instant recognition they bring. Non-dinosaur articles are coming, but expect more than a few that do involve them as the necessary educational relish to the beef of the Lost Worlds blog posts.

Open this photo in gallery:

Steve Brusatte conducting fieldwork on the Isle of Skye, Scotland.Shasta Marrero

Steve Brusatte is a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh who has excavated dinosaurs around the world and named 15 new species. He is the author of The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs, which arrives in bookstores this month.

When I was nine years old, my brother Chris cleared out his bedroom and turned it into a dinosaur museum.

Sure, it wasn&#;t a &#;real&#; museum. Admission was by appointment only. There wasn&#;t a gift shop or an overpriced café. My brother proclaimed himself curator, but there were no docents or conservators on the non-existent payroll. It didn&#;t even have a lock on its door.

The company is the world’s best Animatronic Stegosaurus supplier. We are your one-stop shop for all needs. Our staff are highly-specialized and will help you find the product you need.

What it did have, though, were exhibits &#; of a sort. Posters of T. rex and Triceratops plastered the walls, Jurassic Park toys cluttered the shelves, pieces of real dinosaur bone were given god-like status inside plastic display boxes and a menagerie of stuffed dinosaurs played out a prehistoric scene on top of dinosaur-printed bedsheets.

And then there was the library: more than a hundred books, brimming with every possible factoid about the creatures that so inspired my brother. To flip open one of these books was to enter another world: the incomprehensibly long reach of the Mesozoic Era, which extended roughly 186 million years, from about 252 million to 66 million years ago, when the continents started as one but then drifted apart, climates were boiling, colossal beasts abounded and humans were still tens of millions of years in the future.

Chris was a hoarder of dinosaur gear and dinosaur knowledge. So were many other kids that I grew up with, and although I didn&#;t consider myself one of them, I understood their obsession. We were born and raised in a speck of a town on the Illinois prairie, a place called Ottawa that had nothing else in common with the cosmopolitan Canadian capital. Surrounded by the flattened anonymity of corn and bean fields, it was a safe and pleasant place to live, but not a particularly inspiring one. We needed to find our excitement elsewhere, and for my brother, that was dinosaurs.

Alas, my brother grew out of his &#;dinosaur phase,&#; as my parents liked to call it. But it turned out that his passion was contagious, and it infected me. As I entered high school, and Chris slowly started to trade his dinosaur toys for sports memorabilia, I got hooked. Clandestine visits to his library did the trick. Something about dinosaurs grabbed me, captured my imagination in a way that nothing else ever had. They were simply awesome.

Before long, I came out and told my family that I wanted to be a palaeontologist. Having already been through it once before with Chris, my parents were supportive, although I&#;m sure they thought I was just going through my own weird teenage rebellion phase. But my enthusiasm for dinosaurs lasted, and it became more than an obsession. I began to understand the importance of dinosaurs, to see dinosaur bones as the clues that resurrect lost worlds, reveal how evolution happens and tell us how the Earth has changed over time.

Two decades later, I am now indeed a palaeontologist. My journey studying dinosaurs has taken me around the world &#; to the big cities of Chicago to study geology in college and New York to do my PhD, the magisterial Scottish capital of Edinburgh where I now teach on the faculty of the city&#;s namesake university and to countless deserts, streambeds, road cuts, cliffs and rock outcrops across the globe on the hunt for dinosaur bones.

Through my research, I&#;ve come to understand the evolutionary story of dinosaurs. They started humbly, as gangly cat-sized creatures repopulating a world scarred by volcanoes. After a 50-million-year battle for supremacy, these early dinosaurs finally bested their crocodile cousins as the supercontinent they lived on fractured apart. Over the next 140 million years, they spread around the globe and diversified into long-necked plant-guzzlers the size of Boeing 737s, sharp-toothed carnivores bigger than buses, and a bevy of spiked, plated, armoured, horned, crested and fanged species that lived in almost every conceivable environment on land &#; from the dense forests to the sea shores. One bizarre subgroup of meat-eaters shrunk in size, lengthened their arms and developed feathers and wings, becoming birds &#; about 10,000 species of modern dinosaurs! But then, all of the other dinosaurs died suddenly when an enormous asteroid the size of Mount Everest, traveling faster than a jetliner, struck the Earth, unleashing a chain reaction of fires, tsunamis, earthquakes, volcanoes and other catastrophes that reshaped the world in a matter of days.

Open this photo in gallery:

The fossil remains of the Zhenyuanlong, a raptor discovered in northeastern China.

Surely, in this evolutionary story, there is a lesson for all of us. Dinosaurs were real animals that evolved in concert with real changes in climate and environment. They dealt with warming temperatures and rising sea levels. Although the term &#;dinosaur&#; is often used as an insult for out-of-touch politicians or washed-up celebrities, nothing could be more ridiculous when you think about it. I challenge anyone to stand underneath the earth-shaking skeleton of a Brontosaurus or bone-crushing head of a T. rex and consider dinosaurs as failures. No, they were nature&#;s ultimate success stories, the undisputed rulers of the world for more than 100 million years.

Until one day they weren&#;t. Their shock extinction paved the way for mammals, from which humans evolved. Now, we wear the crown that once belonged to the dinosaurs, but we must do so with caution. If tragedy could happen to them, it could happen to us.

As we keep pumping toxins into the atmosphere and oceans, we seem unwilling or unable to change our ways, despite the best arguments of scientists and environmentalists. The reasons are many, but I think it is largely one of perspective. We have lost respect for the world around us. As technology has brought people closer together through the pull of social media, we seem to be losing a sense of wonder about the planet we call home. More people live in cities than ever before, and people (particularly children) are spending less time immersed in nature. It can be easy to forget that our planet is vast, and old, and fragile, and we are only one small part of a rich legacy of more than four billion years of evolution.

Dinosaurs could still help us. Yes, they provide lessons from prehistory as we try to forge a society resilient to climate and environmental changes, but it&#;s more than that. Even in our tech-mad world, dinosaurs retain their awesomeness. They are gateway drugs that get kids interested in science and nature, and make them want to go outside, go to museums (or, sometimes, start their own museums in their bedrooms) and learn about the deep history of our planet.

Children still love dinosaurs. I see it every time I go into a classroom. Just a few weeks ago, I visited a small school in a blighted area of Edinburgh, untouched by gentrification and with a vibe out of one of the Trainspotting films. About 50 eight-year-olds gathered around, a diversity of working-class children of many nationalities and languages, many of them recent immigrants whose families were drawn from around the world to Scotland&#;s growing capital. They put away their phones and tablets, and for 15 minutes listened slack-jawed as I told them about my job studying dinosaurs. For the next 45 minutes, they asked question after question, surprising me with how much they knew about dinosaurs &#; where certain species lived and how old they were, that some dinosaurs had feathers and evolved into birds, and even how to pronounce tongue-twister names indecipherable to most adults. It seems like they would have continued questioning me for hours if given the chance.

This is the sort of wonder that can&#;t be faked. Whatever it is, there is an indescribable essence about dinosaurs. I wish I knew what it was, but it eludes me, even as it has captivated me to spend my life on the trail of these creatures.

An exceptionally well-preserved fossil of a nodosaur is now on display at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Alberta. It's believed to be the best-preserved armoured dinosaur fossil in the world, including skin and armour.

For more Life Size Dinosaur Costumeinformation, please contact us. We will provide professional answers.