They look like ridiculously useless appendages hanging from this big carnivores body. Those powerful legs and massive head struck fear everywhere but don’t be fooled. Those arms could move in excess of 430 pounds.

Long necks, long tails, and vegetarians. They never existed. Or did they? The skeleton they had was actually an Apatosaurus. The paleontologist put the wrong skull on a skeleton. Yet “Brontosaurus” stuck around thanks to pop culture. But thanks to further research, studies now show that Brontosaurus did exist, and can be distinguished from Apatosaurus.

The belief that dinosaurs were cold blooded existed for a long time. Scientists thought they were like modern day lizards. But other scientists proposed that they were warm blooded as that gave them the muscular power needed to hunt.

Jurassic Park is to blame for this one. Those raptors were bigger than humans, able to run and leap while hunting. They could even open doors! Truth is they were no more the size of a big dog and looked like angry chickens.

Dinosaurs were of a separate lineage in a group called Archosaurs. Pterosaurs and crocodiles are a part of the same group. The split happened around 245 million years ago. Long-necked plesiosaurs, pterosaurs and many others were not dinosaurs.

Movies, museums, TV shows, and even cartoons depict dinosaurs in lush forests and wide open tropical settings. Yes, they did live in such climate, but the world was so different back then. It wouldn’t be too odd to see a T. Rex in the snow.

The fearsome Tyrannosaurus, the massive herbivores, and the horned Triceratops have captured our imaginations for decades. But smaller dinosaurs existed and could be as deadly as the bigger ones. They were still the stuff of nightmares.

This doesn’t even make sense. Those tails were there for balance. Not to mention it helped them walk. Dragging them would have caused the dinosaurs to exert more energy. Jurassic Park got this one right.

Dinosaurs survived for 150 million years. Hominids only have 6 million years to brag about. And we humans have only been around for 200,000 years. We wouldn’t survive an asteroid of that magnitude either.

We were all guilty for thinking that dinosaurs looked the same as modern day lizards. Green, scaly, and cold. They were actually more brightly colored and some even had feathers.

There is evidence showing birds evolving from dinosaurs. The asteroid may have wiped them out but the line survived somehow. Chickens are more closely related to dinosaurs than lizards and snakes.

The first reptiles evolved from their amphibian ancestors. This was during the Carboniferous period around 300 million years ago. Dinosaurs were not the first though you can be forgiven for thinking that. The first dinosaurs appeared 230 million years ago.

Those ancient mammals had dinosaurs for lunch and dinner too. Repenomamus is a 125-million-year-old mammal about the size of a raccoon and it had baby dinosaurs preserved in its gut. Even the giants ran scared at one point.

Most of the herbivores had really small brains. It’s not like they needed all that brain power. But carnivores had larger brains. They had to as hunting demanded more from their senses.

Paleontologists agree that dinosaurs had a slight expansion of the spinal cord in the vicinity of their limbs. The thought of a second brain stemmed from the belief that they had small brains so they needed another one at the end of their body.

That mile-wide meteor that crashed into the Yucatan Peninsula some 65.5 million years ago had people assuming that it all happened so fast that all the dinosaurs died instantly. The truth is that it took over a hundred thousand years for all of them to die.

Many movies and TV shows have depicted dinosaurs as slow, lumbering beasts due to their immense size. Most dinosaurs were probably as mobile as large, modern mammals. A 2000 study of a well-preserved hadrosaur fossil suggested that dinosaurs had powerful hearts more like those of birds or mammals than modern reptiles, so they had higher metabolisms and were more active.

It’s certainly an interesting theory when you do some digging. But unless a man named John Hammond creates a park full of dinosaurs, it never happened. Dinosaurs died out around 65 million years ago while remains of early humans were discovered to only be about 6 million years old. Then again we do have chickens…

Dino fans were told that archaeopteryx was the first bird since it had feathers. Recent studies have shown that most of the dinosaurs, carnivores included, actually had feathers. Archaeopteryx isn’t so special after all.

None of our childhood books on dinosaurs made mention of their reproductive habits. At most, we were told that they laid eggs. Turns out that these huge creatures did enjoy romance. They performed elaborate courtship rituals to impress potential partners.

Julia Clarke, a paleonotologist from the University of Texas at Austin, studied dinosaurs to see if they could actually roar as seen in pop culture. In 2013, Clarke and her team discovered a nearly intact syrinx in a fossilized Late Cretaceous bird Vegavis iaai. No vocal box was discovered. A syrinx is more complex than a larynx. It’s something birds have. Dinosaurs could vocalize but not the way we think we know, thanks to Hollywood.