Dinosaurs were simply too large to survive the forces of nature and evolution

Posted in Animals, Dinosaurs, Nature, Prehistory on Tuesday, 17 September 2013

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This edited article about Prehistoric animals originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 404 published on 11 October 1969.

Anatosaurus, picture, image, illustration

Anatosaurus, the duck-billed dinosaur

The one thing to remember about the monsters of long ago is that they really were monsters. Compared with modern animals they were strangely formed and nearly all of them were enormous.

The most familiar of these monsters are dinosaurs, orders of reptiles, which lived on Earth many years before man arrived.

Tyrannosaurus belonged to the suborder Theropoda and, standing on its hind legs, was probably about 20 ft. high. From head to tail, it measured around 50 ft. It had very sharp teeth, about six inches long, and unlike some dinosaurs was flesh-eating.

In fact, as it and its kind roamed the Earth, hunting for the smaller animals which made up their food, great must have been the clamour that arose from their battles and the ground must have shaken and trembled at their approach.

Rather strangely, however, although tyrannosaurus had very powerful, muscular hind limbs, its forelimbs were tiny and virtually useless.

Allosaurus probably lived rather earlier in time than tyrannosaurus but this also was a formidable beast. There is a specimen in the American Museum of Natural History which is 34 ft. long.

Anatosaurus was rather smaller – around 29 or 30 ft. long. This terrifying creature was an amphibious dinosaur and had webbed feet.

It was also a duck-billed dinosaur: the front of the head was flattened, making it look like a large, very badly-shaped, featherless duck. Like tyrannosaurus, its forelimbs were much smaller and less impressive than its hind limbs but they were not quite so obviously reduced in size.

Some of the dinosaurs were horned and although evolution produced horned dinosaurs over 30 ft. long, many of them were relatively small in size.

Styracosaurus was a quadruped – walking on four feet – and was vaguely similar in appearance to a modern rhinoceros.

The mouth had a protruding beak that was toothless, although the jaws themselves contained teeth which were highly adapted for cutting through vegetation.

Around the neck of these formidable looking animals, there was a hard spiked frill of bone and the face carried one, long, powerful horn.

The styracosaurus attacked or defended itself by the simple process of standing firmly on its four feet and lowering its head. The sharp horn did the rest and, in fact, any animal that attacked a fully-grown styracosaurus was in grave danger of being impaled.

It is possible that the ancestors of the styracosaurus walked on two feet, had thinner skins and smaller horns.

It is quite likely, indeed, that although their skins saved them from attack, their bulk and general clumsiness slowed them up to such an extent that eventually they could not survive. At all events, the horned dinosaurs were almost certainly the last dinosaurs to live on Earth.

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