When you picture a dinosaur, what do you see? A giant monster covered in scales and roaring? A creature ready to chomp down and consume whatever poor person may be standing in their way? The images placed in your head by pop culture and movies may be far from the truth.

To those unfamiliar, dinosaurs ruled Earth during the Mesozoic era, which was a time period from 245 million years ago to 66 million years ago. They were animals that dominated the ecosystem of the entire globe. Though you may think of them as gigantic, they came in all different shapes and sizes; some were only the size of house cats.

As scientists uncover more and more dinosaur fossils, our understanding of dinosaurs grows. Fossils are the remains of animals that lived many years ago. They are formed when bones are covered in sediment, such as sand or mud. As the sediment weighs down on the bones, it creates external pressure and compacts the bones into rock. Water then begins to dissolve the bone and occupy the space until minerals in the water replace the bone entirely, leaving a fossil. There are many things we can learn from fossils, including how old a dinosaur was when it died, how long ago it died, and even what its skin looked like.

Popular culture was right in the assumption that dinosaurs had scaly skin. But as more evidence is unearthed, we learn surprising things. For example, dinosaurs were colourful. By looking at traces of bacteria, reds, greys, and even patterns have been discovered on dinosaur skin. By analyzing fossils, scientists have even determined that some dinosaurs were covered in feathers. This discovery is very important because it implies that dinosaurs are the ancestors of birds.

For a long time, dinosaurs were thought to be the ancestors of lizards, partly because of their name, which comes from the Greek words for terrible and lizard. Scientists now believe that even the most famous dinosaur species, the Tyrannosaurus Rex (T. Rex), had feathers covering a portion of its body. While no fossil evidence of T. Rex feathers has been uncovered, smaller Tyrannosaurs closely related to the T. Rex have been found to have fossilized feathers. The theory is that T. Rex had feathers at birth to conserve warmth but lost the majority of them as it grew older. The ones it kept were thought to be used for mating and display purposes. At birth, T. Rexes were the size of skinny turkeys, but over the course of 20 years, they grew to a height of 3.6-3.9 metres and a weight of 5500-8000 kilograms.

There is still a lot of information we do not know about dinosaurs. For example, scientists still debate about what caused the dinosaurs to go extinct. There is evidence of a large meteor^[1] impacting the Earth 66 million years ago, but we do not know about the other factors that occurred during this time period that led to the extinction of so many dinosaurs. There is, however, no shortage of scientists. Every day more and more children are exposed to dinosaurs through movies or video games and are filled with a burning desire to dig through the dirt to see what mysteries they can solve.