Dinosaurs

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Dinosaurs are comfortably the most iconic prehistoric group of animals, perhaps becaue of their astonishing diversity and potentially enormous scale. As reptiles that ruled the land for over 150 million years, dinosaurs have often been misunderstood as lumbering, slow and primitive monsters. This idea couldn't be further from the truth; the success story of dinosaurs is directly linked to their tenacity and ability to adapt quicker than their competition. Their lineage lives on today in birds, a derived group of maniraptorans.

One of the key early adaptiations of the dinosaurs was bipedalism - all dinosaurs are ancestrally bipedal thanks to a key development it their hips. Unlike the sprawling reptiles of the Triassic, dinosaurs had vertically aligned rear limbs, both allowing them to spend less energy on movement and freeing up their forelimbs to adapt to different environments, leading to rapid diversification. By having the legs directly under their bodies, dinosaurs could grow to gigantic sizes as their weight was more efficiently supported. This unique set of qualities paved the way for dinosaurs to rapidly radiate across the globe, becoming the dominant land vertebrates by the end of the Triassic, and all the way through the Jurassic and Cretaceous. 

Unfortunately for us, Yorkshire is not known for its dinosaurs. As such our dinosaur collection is largely imported from elsewhere: the Isle of Wight, the Rhaetian bone beds of Bristol, and even the fearsome Hell Creek of North America - home of the T. rex.