Dinosaurs and their fearsomeness have been a popular part of the media for the better part of a century. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's work ‘The Lost World’, penned in 1912, Edgar Rice Burroughs' ‘The Land that Time Forgot’ in 1918, and perhaps most famously the Jurassic Park franchise, based on Michael Crichton’s novels, all portray the rediscovery of lost worlds still inhabited by the terrible lizards. But what do you know about the real animals behind the tales? Palaeontology is a scientific domain that just keeps on growing as more and more people become interested in fossils and history. Today we’ll tell you about the stories behind some of the media’s favourite monsters.
The three-horned face
Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion animation of the battle between a T-Rex and a Triceratops is still both a landmark in cinema history and many people’s first introduction to this particular dinosaur. A herbivorous ceratopsid of the Late Cretaceous Period, which was about 68 million years ago, Triceratops literally means 'three-horned face' and is a distant ancestor of the modern Rhinoceros, also now perilously surviving on the brink of a man-made extinction.
The different lizard
By comparison, anyone familiar with the landmark BBC series “Walking with Dinosaurs” will have heard of the Allosaurus. This 'different lizard' lived during the Late Jurassic Era, approximately 150 million years ago, so unlike in ‘Jurassic Park’, it is clear these two dinosaurs would not have crossed paths. A large two-footed predator, the Allosaurus is much like the T-Rex in that they were both the top of their respective food chains.
The Allosaurus had short forelimbs in comparison to the hindlimbs, yet their arms were extremely powerful, with three fingers that ended in large, sharp claws.
Allosaurus' Last Supper
Being on top of the food chain, the Allosaurus was almost certainly feared by all other dinosaurs. Even that which is considered the longest creature to have ever walked the earth, the Apatosaurus, would not have wanted to find itself in the hungry sights of an Allosaurus. In our special Dinosaur auction we have the leg of a young Apatosaurus. This leg, which has some very clear bite marks, was found on top of the skeleton of an Allosaurus. It is quite possible that the Apatosaurus was the last meal of the Allosaurus.
As far as being able to extract dinosaur DNA from blood sucking insects trapped in fossilised amber, unfortunately this must, for the time being, remain the dream of creative visionaries such as Michael Crichton, Steven Spielberg and Richard Attenborough. However, through Catawiki’s Fossil auctions, it is possible to own your own piece of dinosaur history; with genuine fossils of the Cretaceous Triceratops, the Jurassic Allosaurus and even fine specimens of amber, some containing insects, available for bidding.