Preschoolers love dinosaurs and so do I. It’s exciting to learn about creatures that lived so long ago and seem so foreign to us. It ties right into our creative imaginations. The only problem is most dinosaur books and most people’s understanding of the great creatures is out of date.
It’s not that Paleontologists where wrong about dinosaurs, it’s that in the 2 decades and even in the past 2 years we have learned so much more. Recently scientists have been able to dig in new locations around the world and advances in reading fossils have given us new insights into what dinosaurs looked like and how they lived. There is no longer any question that their descendants are today’s birds.
Recent fossils not only show that many if not most dinosaurs had feathers, but the remaining evidence of melanin even tells us what color the feathers were! Melanin is one of the many pigments found in modern day bird feathers. Round melanin cells – feathers in the red and orange family. Sausage shaped melanin cells black and brown feathers. It works just the same in the birds of today.
Dinosaurs had many of the traits and likely also the habits of birds. They were not like the grey lumbering giants they used to be portrayed as.
If you are interested in a good book, National Geographic just updated their dinopedia this month. It’s called The National Geographic Kids Ultimate Dinopedia, Second Edition released October 10, 2017. It ‘s a great place to start, but I can guarantee that it will be out of date with in the year! Well there will just be a lot more information as the current digs are giving us new facts on an almost weekly basis.
If you want to learn more about Dinosaurs for you or for information to share with your child I recommend you check out the BBC Radio 4 podcast In Our Time. The 43-minute talk on Feathered Dinosaurs is available here…
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b099v33p
This site also includes a reading list. It’s for adults, but if your interested or your child wants the facts, you might find some good resources for the most up to date information on this site.