I believe that after watching this movie, many children who do not understand what genetically modified organisms are and have no concept of the ancient world will leave an impression of "cannibalism" and "ferocity" on dinosaurs. If your bear child finishes watching the movie and says, "Mom, I'm afraid dinosaurs will come and eat me in the middle of the night," how do you convince him that the real dinosaurs are not like in Jurassic World?
To crack the misunderstanding brought by the movie world to children, you can start from the following aspects. First, were dinosaurs all behemoths? Second, what did the real dinosaurs look like when they were preying on a fight? Third, how smart were dinosaurs?
Without further ado, let's go to the picture.
This is a stone pillar excavated by paleontologists in the Junggar Basin of Xinjiang, in which there are five dinosaur fossils from top to bottom, yes, you read it right, it is five. Note the height of the stone pillar on the left side of the figure: 0.9 meters.
How could there be five dinosaurs buried together from top to bottom? And only 0.9 meters! Are you sure you're not burying a dinosaur egg?
About 160 million years ago, it was not the Gobi Desert today, but a swamp at the foot of a small mountain range dotted with volcanic craters. After a volcanic eruption, thick ash fell to the swamp, forming a very sticky mud. After the large sauropod dinosaurs humbly stepped on this soft ground, the footprints left behind became the death traps of the small dinosaurs.
When a dinosaur passed by this place, perhaps hearing the wailing of the trapped beast under the pit, or smelling the smell of rotten flesh, he jumped down to eat a full meal, but he did not expect that he was already in the mud and could not extricate himself. It struggled in the mud for too long, and the wailing attracted other predators, making the death trap drama staged again.
This is a shocking story unearthed by paleontologists James Clark and Xu Xing with funding from the National Geographic Society. Of course, there is more to this similar death cave. The expedition also found the remains of several headless dinosaurs, apparently bitten off by predators while struggling desperately in the swamp. Other dinosaur fossils have broken heads, indicating that these dinosaurs died of horrific violence.
Restore the appearance of the five dinosaurs "stacked arhats", which is roughly like this:
The two dinosaurs at the top of the "dinosaur stack" in the image above are called crowned dragons by experts, and the adult crowned dragons above may have fallen into it while preying on the juvenile crowned dragons that were stuck in the mud below. The adult crowned dragon is only 3.7 meters long.
You may think that these dinosaurs who fell into the swamp and could not escape are probably small characters in the dinosaur world, and I have never heard of such a tragic time when the powerful Tyrannosaurus rex was also so tragic.
Not really.
What does such a small point have to do with a Tyrannosaurus Rex with a body length of 11.5 --- 14.7 meters, an average height of 5.1 meters, and an average weight of 10 tons?
Don't underestimate these crowned dragons, they are the earliest ancestors of the notorious Tyrannosaurus family known, and the Tyrannosaurus rex family evolved the most terrifying Tyrannosaurus rex. Most people think of Tyrannosaurus rex as powerful predators, but that was actually late in their evolution. For most of the history of the Tyrannosaurus family, they were probably only equivalent to the jackals of that time.
This story adequately answers the first and second questions we asked above: Dinosaurs are not all behemoths, or giant dinosaurs are just the tip of the iceberg of the dinosaur world. The scene of dinosaurs fighting each other is no different from the scene depicted in the movie, but the director probably took into account the receptivity of the children on the stage, and did not sketch the scene of "biting off the head" as found in the archaeological excavations, but only let the dinosaur d-rex bite off the necks of other dinosaurs. At the top of the "Stacked Arhats" are an adult crowned dragon and a juvenile crowned dragon, the latter whose neck has been broken, which seems to mean that the crowned dragon, the ancestor of the Tyrannosaurus rex, also fed on its own kind. This one sounds even more bloody and terrifying than the movie.
Maybe you already feel that the third question does not need to be answered: I see that dinosaurs did not become extinct from asteroids hitting the earth, but stupidly died! How could they be so stupid as to jump into the swamp one by one to die?
At least in the movie "Jurassic World" and the previous "Jurassic Park" series, dinosaurs are very intelligent (although the dinosaurs in this film are said to be genetically mutated hybrid dinosaurs at the beginning, not real dinosaurs). For example, the tyrannical dragon d-rex was raised in a separate captivity since childhood, but has a memory of implanting trackers, carving marks on the wall with sharp claws, confusing everyone, and then sneaking away, and also digging the tracker out of the body to avoid human pursuit.
The IQ of dinosaurs has always been a topic of debate among paleontologists. Since the Dinosaur Renaissance, people's understanding of dinosaurs has changed a lot, and dinosaurs are no longer considered a lazy cold-blooded animal, but a group of active hot-blooded animals, especially some theropod dinosaurs, although they have always been considered not intelligent, but their intelligence has also been recognized. This led to a series of popular literature hypes about dinosaur intelligence. At present, paleontologists believe that dinosaurs have the highest IQ among reptiles, but not without the intelligence of modern mammals. So you can safely and boldly tell your child: dinosaurs will not come to eat you in the middle of the night, and he will definitely be dizzy in the intricate city streets before he finds you.