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Palaeonotes for parents and teachers
These notes are designed to give additional information to adults so they can talk about the animals in the puzzles with their young charges. Specific attention has been paid to providing answers for questions that children are likely to ask, as well as ideas for conversations with youngsters that prompt them to use their imaginations and develop their powers of comparison and deduction. Interesting information that is not generally known is also given in the form of SPECIAL NOTES. SPECIAL NOTE: Dinosaurs were LAND ANIMALS only. The animals (not fish) swimming in the sea at the same time as the dinosaurs, were NOT dinosaurs. They were sea-living REPTILES. The creatures flying around in the air at the time of the dinosaurs - the Pterodactyls (Ter-o-dak-tills) and other pterosaurs (Ter-o-sores) - were NOT dinosaurs. They were flying reptiles. The dinosaurs were a special group of land-living animals only. They were also NOT reptiles in the way that modern snakes and lizards are reptiles. They belong in a special group called the ARCHOSAURS (Ark-o-sores), because they worked differently from true reptiles. All dinosaurs - both the kind that walked on four legs and the kind that walked on two - kept their tails UP OFF THE GROUND when they moved. They had to, because their tails behind them balanced their heads and necks in front. If they had tried to drag their tails on the ground, they would have tipped over backwards. Massospondylus was a prosauropod, which means “Before the Lizard-Foot”. It was one of the early dinosaurs of the late Triassic/early Jurassic periods. Its name was created in 1854 by the famous Sir Richard Owen of the British Museum in London - the same man who came up with the word 'Dinosaur' - and was based on a few vertebrae (back-bones) that had been sent to England from South Africa. A full-grown Massospondylus could grow up to 6 m (about 20 feet) long from snout to tail-tip, so it was not a giant by any means (and certainly could not compare in size with its later giant Jurassic cousins like Diplodocus (Dip-lod-o-kuss) and Brachiosaurus (Brak-ee-o-saw-russ). It had back legs that were longer than its front legs, and a surprisingly small head for its body with peg-like teeth that could not chew. In order to grind up the plant material it ate, therefore, it swallowed small stones and pebbles (like the grit pecked up and swallowed by birds for the same reason), which mashed up the food inside its stomach. Such stones are called gastroliths (literally “stomach-stones”). Massospondylus laid eggs that were not very much larger than chicken eggs. Fossilised Massospondylus eggs in the museum of the Bernard Price Institute for Palaeontological Research at Wits University in Johannesburg are the oldest dinosaur eggs ever found. The dinosaur's front feet each had a 'thumb' with a large, curved claw, which was not just used for grasping. What do you think Massospondylus could do with its claws? What would you do with big nails on your front thumbs if you walked on four legs? The claws would have made excellent weapons (self-defence), and would also have been very useful for scraping roots or plants out of the ground. An interesting thing about Massospondylus is the size of its eyes: they took up almost a third of its skull.
Can you think of anything alive today with really big eyes? There's owls, of course, and bush-babies or nagapies (nach-a-peeze, with a gutteral “ch”). What do these creatures have in common? They are nocturnal: they search for food and eat at night, so their eyes have to be big enough to take in and use as much as possible of the available light. Does this mean Massospondylus
was a nocturnal dinosaur? Probably.
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