CBBC - Everything you need to know about dinosaurs

Dinosaurs are a group of pre-historic reptiles which lived over 140 million years ago. They took many forms, including the huge hulking plant eating brontosaurus to the fast and skilled hunters of raptors to even (and stop us if you've heard of this one before) the scary beasts of the tyrannosaurus rex!

Most dinosaurs lived on land and laid eggs (like most current reptiles). They also normally either walked on four legs or were bipedal (with two legs and two arms).

Dinosaurs lived on every continent, which at the time was a single supercontinent called Pangea. Then through a process called continental drift, Pangea started to split apart during the 165 million years the dinosaurs existed, eventually creating the separate continents across the globe that we are familiar with today. There were even dinosaurs in Great Britain!

The current theory is that around 66 million years ago, 3/4 of the planet's plant and animal species were wiped out through a huge asteroid crashing into the Earth. This is commonly referred to as the "Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event" (try saying that four times fast!). This theory was first made by the geologist Walter Alvarez and his father Luis Walter Alvarez in 1980.

It's thought that the meteor hit the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico (with the area now known as the Chicxulub crater). The diameter of the impact crater is about 110 miles with a depth of 12 miles.

This event caused the rapid and global extinction of non-avian dinosaurs across the globe. Millions of years down the line, the surviving non-avian dinosaurs evolved into the birds we know of today.

A fossil is normally any preserved remains of a plant or animal. They could be anything from dinosaur bones and teeth, to shells and even poo! Dinosaur teeth were especially strong enough to stand the test of time.

Normally fossils are found preserved in stone, where palaeontologists (who are scientists who study ancient life through fossils) dig them out. That is how we got most of the dinosaur skeletons that you might have seen in a museum.

Sometimes a fossil can even be footprints or impressions that dinosaurs, plants and ancient creatures have left behind.

Dinosaur fossils are made after parts of a dinosaur (including teeth or bones) are buried under sediment (such as sand or dirt). Over millions of years, water in the nearby rocks replaces the dinosaur parts with minerals which create a solid rock copy of the original specimen. But sometimes dinosaur parts are found preserved in other ways like being coated in amber. Pretty cool huh?

Unfortunately sometimes people create fake dinosaur fossils to either sell for lots of money or to try and get famous, but can you spot these dinosaurs from the di-no-way?

Fossils are found through a process called “prospecting”, where palaeontologists and geologists look around the world at old rocks in the hope of finding shards or whole fossils. Normally they will dig fossils out of the rock by mining the surrounding area.

Even though fossils are normally found by palaeontologists, scientists and geologists; anyone is able to find a fossil if they look hard enough! For example this nine-year-old found a 200-million-year-old fossil whilst walking on the beach with his dad.

Fossils are very important! Not only do fossilised bones allow palaeontologists and scientists to piece together dinosaurs for us to see (kind of like a huge jigsaw puzzle) but they also let us learn more about the history of the Earth.

The Patagotitan is thought to be the biggest of all the dinosaurs, measuring around an estimated 120 feet in length and weighing over 55 tonnes. They were part of a group of dinosaurs called the Titanosauria, which was made of lots of long necked dinosaurs who were each bigger than the next. But new fossil findings might reveal a dinosaur even bigger than the patagotitan.

One of the fastest dinosaurs currently discovered is thought to be the velociraptor, which could run up to 25mph with an estimated sprint of 40mph. Put this against the fastest human on record (Usain Bolt, who very briefly reached 27½ mph) and it makes us glad we aren’t still in the world of dinosaurs!

The raptor rope race is on! But will Steve be able to outpace the raptor?

The smallest dinosaur that has ever been discovered was called Oculudentavis khaungraae and was around the same size as a hummingbird. It was a dinosaur which lived in Myanmar around 100 million years ago and a fossil of it was found preserved in amber in 2020.

Some dinosaurs you might have heard of before could include the T-Rex (tyrannosaurus), triceratops, diplodocus, velociraptor, stegosaurus, brontosaurus and the ankylosaurs, but we want to hear which dinosaur you think is the coolest in this vote!

It was commonly thought that all dinosaurs had only lizard like skin, but new fossil findings have shown that some dinosaurs did in fact have feathers. This is why a lot of older drawings and illustrations of dinosaurs have scaly smooth dinosaurs whilst newer ones might have feathers. It's still unknown if all dinosaurs had feathers or not, or how much of each dinosaur was covered in feathers, but we might find the answer through new fossil discoveries. 

 Some dinosaurs were even thought to have feathers which changed colour!

The hadrosaurs (also known as duck-billed dinosaurs) had up to 1000 teeth! Coming in a close second is the triceratops which had around 800 teeth. It would take forever to brush all of those!

The mamenchisaurus sinocanadorum is thought to have the longest neck at around 50 feet long. This sauropod's neck made up almost half of it's total body length, imagine how easy it would be to reach the top shelf in the kitchen with that kind of length!

Watch
Check out Deadly Dinosaurs with Steve Backshall on CBBC and iPlayer to learn about everything from “the spitfire of the dinosaur world” and “a run in with Predator X”. Find out what goes into making a dinosaur for TV.

Play
Some deadly dinosaurs have escaped. Will you be able to catch them all before time runs out and avoid getting CHOMPED! Draw your own ferocious, weird or down-right silly dinosaur in Creative Lab. Do you know enough about dinosaurs to get full marks in the ultimate dino-knowledge quiz?

Activities and makes
What do you think is the coooooolest dinosaur? Let your voice be heard! Get dino-arty with your very own deadly dinosaur mask, all you need is a cereal box and some art supplies.

Learn
Dinosaurs existed throughout the globe, but how much do you know about these British dinosaurs?