Facts About Dinosaurs

Dinosaurs ruled the Earth for around 165 million years before vanishing roughly 66 million years ago — an almost unimaginable reign. The word means “terrible lizard,” but the real animals were far stranger and more varied than that name suggests, ranging from feathered hunters no bigger than a turkey to long-necked giants heavier than a dozen elephants, on every continent including Antarctica.

Several different dinosaurs together in a prehistoric landscape
For some 165 million years, dinosaurs ruled the Earth in a staggering variety of shapes and sizes.

They appeared during the Triassic period, rose to dominance through the Jurassic, and reached their peak in the Cretaceous. Over that span they split into wonderfully different shapes: enormous long-necked sauropods like Apatosaurus that swallowed plants whole; two-legged theropod predators from the mighty Tyrannosaurus rex to the small, feathered Velociraptor; armored tanks like Ankylosaurus; plated Stegosaurus; and the duck-billed herds that grazed in their millions.

Part of what makes them so fascinating is how much we can read from what they left behind. A single fossil tooth can reveal whether a dinosaur ate plants or flesh, how it hunted, and even roughly how old it was when it died — flat grinding teeth point to a plant-eater, serrated blades to a predator. It’s how we know some dinosaurs carried hundreds of teeth at once, and that one in particular, Nigersaurus, had about 500 of them lined up like a living lawnmower across the front of its jaw. Diet, size, speed, even the famous sail of Spinosaurus: most of it was pieced together from fossils, one careful discovery at a time.

Fossilized dinosaur skeleton embedded in rock at an excavation site
Almost everything we know comes from fossils — bones, teeth and footprints turned to stone over millions of years.

And they never entirely left. The asteroid impact 66 million years ago wiped out the giants, but one feathered branch survived — today’s birds are living dinosaurs. That link is also why we now know animals like Velociraptor were covered in feathers, looking nothing like their scaly Hollywood versions.

Asteroid streaking through the sky over a Late Cretaceous dinosaur landscape
An asteroid impact 66 million years ago ended the age of dinosaurs — though their feathered descendants, the birds, live on.

The records still astonish. The largest sauropods, such as Argentinosaurus, may have stretched well over 100 feet and weighed as much as ten elephants, while some feathered theropods were no bigger than a pigeon. A T. rex bite delivered an estimated 10,000 pounds per square inch — enough to crush bone — yet its tiny arms remain one of paleontology’s great unsolved puzzles. Some dinosaurs were surprisingly fast, others surprisingly social, nesting in colonies and tending their young. And new species are still named almost every week, which means the picture keeps shifting: much of what we thought we knew a generation ago has already been rewritten by better fossils.

The Dino Toys blog is where we dig into the questions people actually ask about these creatures. Which dinosaur really had 500 teeth, and which others come close? How big was a raptor compared to the movie monster? Was the T. rex a hunter or a scavenger? Each guide gathers what paleontologists currently know and separates solid science from the myths — and the wider site covers the toys and figures these animals inspire, from collector models to first dinosaurs for toddlers. Browse our latest articles below, with plenty more on the way.

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