Question: which dinosaurs anatomy do you find most interesting?

Michael Schubert answered on 27 Nov 2023:

There are a lot of dinosaurs with really interesting anatomical features! I really enjoy studying the anatomy of large carnivores because there has been a lot of debate around the way they eat – whether they were predators or scavengers or both. The shapes of their skulls and the way the muscles attached to them has taught us a lot about how they eat and, especially, how they swallow. It turns out that they probably ate a lot like birds of prey, tearing off a chunk of their prey and then tossing their heads up to gulp it down.

I’m also really interested in the anatomy of the big herbivores because the way they were built, the muscle attachment sites on the bone, and the footprint tracks we’ve found can tell us about how they walked. We can use their anatomy to find out things like how fast they moved, whether or not they could swim, and all sorts of other things.

Dinosaurs with really unusual features are also very cool. For instance, there’s a super cool dinosaur called Dracorex hogwartsia (which means “dragon king of Hogwarts”) that had horn-like spikes coming out of its skull. Scientists are still debating why it had those spikes, but there are lots of interesting theories!