It's hard to turn around these days without bumping into a dinosaur. You see them everywhere: dinosaur tee shirts, dinosaur movies, dinosaur toys, and even frosted-crunchy dinosaur cereal. Every museum has competed to offer an exhibit of Real! Live! Dinosaurs that munch leaves, look you in the eye, roar, and move menacingly toward you. But there is more hype than fact in the current dinosaur craze. Not many people really understand what dinosaurs were. Even the name -- which every third grader learns is Greek for terrible lizard -- is deceptive. For one thing, dinosaurs weren't lizards. They were reptiles, certainly, but there are other reptiles -- snakes, turtles, and crocodiles -- that aren't lizards, and neither were dinosaurs. Lizards, you see, crawl on their cowardly bellies, because their legs grow out from their bodies. No self-respecting dinosaur ever did that. These upstanding beasts grew legs under their bodies, got their bellies off the ground, and moved out! But weren't they terrible? Taken as a whole, no. Common sense tells us that for every carnivorous tyrannosaur there had to be hundreds or thousands of placid vegetarians -- otherwise T. Rex would soon have run out of prey. Do we call the present ruling order "terrible mammals" just because there are a few wolves among us? Of course not.The old mental image we have of dinosaurs as huge, slow, stupid beasts is wrong, too. For one thing, they weren't all huge. Even full-grown dinosaurs came in varieties as small as Chihuahuas. Plenty of them were people-sized. Some were the largest land animals ever, true, but of those none came close to our fellow mammal, the blue whale. Were those giants slow? The largest mammals -- elephants, hippos, and rhinos -- can run faster than you can. There's no reason to think that even the behemoth Seismosaurus couldn't move right along when he wanted to. And there's plenty of evidence that many of the carnivores were outright roadrunners. Th...
