Animals   In   Danger

 

Prehistoric :

Dinosaurs lived long before people started writing history .They are called  prehistoric animals. They lived long before there were any people on earth. Fossils can tell us a lot about what animals were like, what plants were like and how long they lived.

The Dinosaurs

Dinosaur is a name that means terrible lizard. Many people think that dinosaurs were giants. They weren't. Some dinosaurs were as small as dogs. 

All these dinosaur families were different from each other in many ways. But they were all alike in one way. A dinosaur's  body was built for walking on two legs. There are no such reptiles in the world today. An animal that walks on two legs is called biped. And all the first dinosaurs were bipeds. They walked on their back legs. Later, some dinosaurs did get down and walk on fours but they still had the bodies of bipeds. 

Tyrannosaurus rex was the biggest meat eating animal there's ever been on earth. Its head was just over one meter in length. It's sharp dagger-like teeth were nearly as long as a man's hand.

For more than 100 million years, dinosaurs filled the world. Then something happened. We do not exactly know why the dinosaurs became extinct. Some scientists think the earth was struck by a huge meteorite from space and this killed all the dinosaurs off very suddenly. Other scientists think the dinosaurs became extinct very slowly. Nobody knows. It's a kind of mystery.     

 

Home  |  Prehistoric  | Extinct  | Under Threat  |  Saved  |  Can We Help  |  Related Links

                                                                                                                      Next >>