In the first half of the 20th century, scientists and the mass media saw dinosaurs as slow-moving, languid, cold-blooded animals. But the Dinosaur Renaissance, which began in the 1970s, suggested that dinosaurs might be a group of active warm-blooded animals and possibly social behavior. Numerous evidence of the relationship between dinosaurs and birds found supports the hypothesis of dinosaur warm-blooded animals.
Since the first dinosaur fossils were identified by the scientific method in the early 19th century, reconstructed dinosaur skeletons have become a major exhibit in museums around the world. Dinosaurs are already part of popular culture, and both children and adults have a high interest in dinosaurs. Dinosaurs are often the subject of popular books and movies, such as Jurassic Park, and various media often report on the scientific progress and new discoveries of dinosaurs.
All dinosaurs were land animals. Many prehistoric reptiles are often informally identified as dinosaurs by the general public, such as pterodactyls, ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, plesiosaurs, and panosaurs (allodons and phyllosaurs), but from a scientific point of view, these are not dinosaurs.
The age of dinosaurs is so far away that without the help of fossils, we would have known nothing about the mysterious species of dinosaurs. So the study of dinosaurs, that is, the study of dinosaur fossils. Dinosaur fossils can be roughly divided into two types: skeletal fossils and fossil footprints, which are mainly preserved in sedimentary rocks formed during the Mesozoic period.
The formation of dinosaur fossils is a complex and long process, which involves the death and extinction of dinosaurs, and is also closely related to the changes of the earth over the billions of years, and its discovery and excavation are also not easy. Scientists look for traces of dinosaur fossils through various means, and use modern high-tech means to restore and study dinosaurs.
Through their work, we have gradually learned about the shape and life form of dinosaurs, and new discoveries and new views on dinosaurs from all over the world have repeatedly revised our original dinosaur image to bring it closer to the truth.