Picture a dinosaur in a film, TV series or comic. Chances are it will be stomping around a dark, barren landscape, in a foul mood, gobbling up ing creatures, while a volcano spews lava in the background.
Except, that’s not really what dinosaurs were like. The return of the BBC documentary series Walking With Dinosaurs focuses on various prehistoric animals, but puts them in a more realistic context. As paleontologist Professor Emily Bamforth explained to BBC Bitesize, there are still a lot of things we get wrong about dinosaurs.
We don’t really know what dinosaurs ate
Some stories with a generous helping of dramatic licence can depict a Tyrannosaurus rex ruthlessly hunting human cave dwellers. That’s just not possible - dinosaurs were extinct long before people populated the planet - but proving what they did eat to keep them going is almost as impossible a task.
Professor Bamforth said: “With dinosaur diets, they’re based primarily on dentition, what dinosaur teeth looked like. Obviously we have big carnivores like T. rex and they have sharp teeth, so we assume they eat meat. Then we have a whole bunch of dinosaurs that have teeth designed for eating plants, so we assume that those are plant eaters - and then we actually have dinosaurs that have no teeth at all, like the ostrich mimic.”
Although this evidence can help experts deduce what sort of food the dinosaurs probably ate, they can’t pinpoint the exact plants or animals that formed their diets. One of the most useful sources of information on the subject for paleontologists is coprolite - fossilised dinosaur poo.
Studies using isotopes can reveal where different dinosaurs belonged on the food chain and the wear on fossilised teeth can show which plants they ate.
“It’s fair to say I think the picture is becoming clearer about dinosaur diets,” Prof Bamforth continued. “Now we’re looking more specifically at things like food webs, in particular the Cretaceous period. How do these animals fit into their ecosystem and not only what they are eating, but how does their eating affect everything around them? That’s a big shift. We’re going from looking at individual animals in of what they eat to how they fit into the world that they live in.”
We’re still working out what dinosaurs looked like
Images of Triceratops, Stegosaurus and Diplodocus may feel like they’re embedded in our minds, from the way they have been portrayed in different media over the years. The colour and shape of these creatures could have been very different in reality, as new research seems to suggest - with the discovery of the remains of feathered dinosaurs in China in the 1990s proving something of a game-changer.
Prof Bamforth said of the revelation: “We suddenly went from having the type of Velociraptors you would see in Jurassic Park - scary and naked - to what we now know is, they were probably pretty fluffy. They would have looked quite a lot like birds.”
Another example Prof Bamforth likes relates to the Iguanodon, and how an image of one was sculpted in the 19th Century: “There was a complete Iguanodon found in the 1820s or 1830s, the whole skeleton. Despite the fact the whole skeleton was there, they reconstructed it to look like a giant iguana.”
The Iguanodon in question was recreated in statue form for an exhibition in London's Crystal Palace in the 1850s. Today’s research shows the Iguanodon had spikes on its thumbs but, back in the 1800s, the team realising the statue decided that the spike should go on its nose instead.
“Now, of course,” Prof Bamforth continued, “we know that the Iguanodon was still a very large animal but also sleek and slender. Even though we have the same materials as we did 150 years ago, our understanding of what these creatures look like has fundamentally changed because we now know that these dinosaurs aren’t big, lumbering lizards. They’re kind of a group of animals all to themselves.”
The different environments where dinosaurs lived
Prof Bamforth is the curator of Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum in Alberta, Canada. The way dinosaurs’ habitats are presented can be frustrating to her - especially when it’s close to home.
She said: “In western North America [dinosaurs are] traditionally depicted as being out in a barren river valley or on dry dirt, and off in the distance there’s a forest. Paleobotanists - people who study fossil plants - hate this.”
Even the larger dinosaurs such as Tyrannosaurus rex were forest dwellers, Prof Bamforth explained: “That’s kind of hard to get your head around. You think this big animal must have a lot of space, but they actually were living in forests and they were ambush predators, sneaking up on their prey through these thick trees.”
She added: “The other thing I think that’s changed about how we perceive dinosaurs in their environments is that traditionally they’re always seen either eating something or fighting something, particularly T. rex or some of these other big predators. In fact, 95 per cent of the time, these animals are resting or just wandering around or doing the things that animals do in their environment, like taking a drink at a river.”
Not all dinosaurs were around at the same time
We may see the different types of dinosaur in the same way as animals that are on the planet right now. Elephants and giraffes are very different, but live in the same world - surely it was the same for the Stegosaurus and the T. rex?
It wasn’t. Different dinosaurs lived in different periods over what is known as the Mesozoic Era, which can be separated into the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous periods.
Prof Bamforth smiled: “My favourite statistic that I like to tell the students that come here is there is more time that separates the Stegosaurus from the T. Rex than separates the T. Rex and us. That puts in perspective how spread out the age of dinosaurs was. When people think of it, they want to jam all of them in there together!
“But there’s a big story of the history of life in there. They had different kinds of worlds that happened over millions and millions of years. About 130 million years.”
Homo sapiens, the species today’s humans come from has a bit of catching up to do. We’ve been around for about 300,000 years.
Walking With Dinosaurs is available to watch on BBC One and BBC iPlayer.
This article was published in May 2025
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