Our ideas about dinosaurs have also changed radically. The dinosaurs we know today are very different from the ones in the books you may have read as a child.

Credit: Simo Q/Flickr, CC BY-NC

Myth 1: Dinosaurs were all big 

     The name dinosaur tends to evoke images of giants – and certainly many were very large. But not all dinosaurs were giants. The smaller species were probably more common than their giant cousins.

Myth 2: Dinosaurs were all scaly

     When dinosaurs were first discovered, it seemed obvious that because they were related to crocodiles and lizards, they must have been scaly. But in 1997 a small carnivorous dinosaur was found to be covered not with scales, but a soft, fuzzy down.

Myth 3: Dinosaurs were all green and brown

      In early paintings of dinosaurs, they dressed in depressing shades of grey, green, and brown. But in reality the colors would have been much more vibrant, even garish. Analyses show that dinosaurs came in a wide variety of colors including black, white, and ginger.

Credit: Dave Catchpole/Flickr, CC BY

Myth 4: Dinosaurs were bad parents

     Dinosaurs were once thought to use the "lay them and leave them" strategy. We now know thats wrong. Expeditions to the Gobi Desert found a dinosaur sitting on eggs like brooding birds. It turns out dinosaur didnt eat eggs, it was guarding them.

Myth 5: Dinosaurs were doomed to extinction

     Dinosaur extinction was long blamed on some failure of the dinosaurs themselves, a failure to adapt to the changing environment. The disappearance of the dinosaurs wasnt fated – it was a cosmic accident. If the asteroid had deviated by a fraction of a fraction of a degree, dinosaurs would still rule the planet – and we wouldnt.

Myth 6: Dinosaurs all became extinct

      A handful of small feathered dinosaurs, probably less than a dozen species, survived. They were birds, the direct descendants of the carnivorous dinosaurs. And they not only survived but thrived, evolving into some ten thousand species of birds.

     Is there any new idea in your mind?

-------This article was originally published on The Conversation