Weirdest Dinosaur Questions Answered!

Did dinosaurs have nipples? Did Stegosauruses have an extra brain? We asked Jurassic World’s official paleontologist Brian Switek all your weirdest and most random questions! why are dinosaur bones radioactive Wait . . . if dinosaur bones are radioactive . . . then why didn’t Dr. Alan Grant have superpowers? According to Brian though, some dinosaur bones are indeed radioactive! As to why, it’s all about minerals. Over time, water carrying minerals percolates through dinosaur bones, and some of those minerals are radioactive. While that doesn’t mean bones glowing in the dark, or mutated giants rising from the rock, fossils containing uranium can sometimes give off radon gas - meaning that experts might want to hold their breath when examining them. did dinosaurs become chickens How could anyone look at a T-Rex and a rooster and think they’re related? But according to Brian, they are. Way back in the Jurassic, about 160 million years ago, a new form of feathery dinosaur evolved. Paleontologists call them “avian dinosaurs,” and they thrived alongside their relatives for tens of millions of years. And when all the other dinosaurs went extinct, birds somehow survived. Mind you, not ALL dinosaurs were birds; but birds were one kind of dinosaur that managed to survive. Emus, eagles, penguins, pigeons, and even chickens… In a way, all of them are living dinosaurs, even if none of them could trample a jeep. were there dinosaurs with 2 brains Hold onto your butts for this one. It’s a popular myth that some dinosaurs kept a spare brain in their booty. Unfortunately . . . it just isn’t so. Brian’s answer to this doozy takes us back to the 19th century, when a paleontologist noticed that there was a space inside the hip of a Stegosaurus skeleton that was bigger than the space in its head for a brain. So they theorized that it had a lot more than just junk in the trunk. In actual fact, lots of animals have extra room in the hips for the spinal cord. And in dinosaurs, there might have been something else too[dinosaur skeleton with question mark]. Birds have space there for something called a glycogen body, which zoologists theorize is a place to store extra energy as sugars. The same was probably true of big dinosaurs. It’s all in the hips. did dinosaurs drink milk This one has gotta be an obvious “NO” . . . Milk comes from mammals, and dinosaurs were reptiles . . . A raptor with a milk moustache just seems wrong. But according to Brian, it’s not impossible. Some birds produce their own version of milk. Pigeons and penguins, for example, regurgitate a milky substance called crop milk. It’s a fatty liquid some birds can secrete in their throats to feed to their young . . . aaand it’s super gross. What’s the dinosaur connection? Well, birds are living dinosaurs, so if birds can do it… MAYBE some dinosaurs did, too. do dinosaurs dance We thought we had Brian with his one . . . but apparently, there’s at least one special circumstance in which dinosaurs definitely strutted their stuff. A huge field of dinosaur tracks found in Colorado include some strange scrape marks. They were made by therapod dinosaurs similar to Carnotaurus. But the dinosaurs weren’t digging. Instead, experts suspect, they were scratching their feet during a courtship dance to get the attention of other dinosaurs. Some dinosaurs still do this. Puffins and some parrots that build nests on the grounds scrape their feet during mating displays. Maybe it’s not salsa, but, to another dinosaur, foot-scraping might have been a pretty suave move.