🦖 Meet the dinosaurs

A dinosaur was a big animal that lived on Earth long, long ago. It walked, it ate, and some even had scales like a lizard.

Dinosaurs were amazing reptiles that lived on Earth a very, very long time ago, long before people. Some were bigger than a bus and some were as small as a chicken. They walked the land for millions of years, and then died out ages before the first humans appeared.

Dinosaurs came in every size you can imagine. The biggest, the long-necked giants, were taller than a house and longer than a swimming pool. The smallest were about the size of a chicken or a house cat. So not all dinosaurs were huge, some were tiny.

Nobody knows for sure, but dinosaurs may have been green, brown, or even spotted like some animals today.

Many dinosaurs had big feet with sharp claws, like a giant bird's feet.

Some dinosaurs ate only plants, munching leaves, ferns and treetops all day long. Others were meat eaters that hunted or scavenged other animals. You can often tell them apart by their teeth: flat teeth for grinding plants, and sharp, pointed teeth for tearing meat.

No, all the big dinosaurs are gone now. But birds are their close cousins, and birds are alive today.

Nobody has ever heard a dinosaur, so we cannot be sure. But by studying their bones and their closest living relatives, birds and crocodiles, scientists think many dinosaurs boomed, honked, hissed or rumbled rather than roaring like a lion in films. Some may have made deep sounds we would feel more than hear.