Dinosaur Facts Kids Will Love

Here are 19 dinosaur facts for kids, each checked against the Natural History Museum and other expert sources. Some are about famous names like T. rex and Stegosaurus, and quite a few are British stories: the first dinosaur ever named, a giant claw found in Surrey and a footprint trail uncovered in Oxfordshire.

Names and firsts

1. The word is younger than the bones. Nobody had heard the word "dinosaur" until 1842, when the anatomist Richard Owen invented it. Owen later became the first Superintendent of the Natural History Museum in London.
2. Not quite "terrible lizard". The name is usually translated as "terrible lizard", but Owen himself described dinosaurs as "fearfully great", a nod to their enormous size.
3. The first dinosaur ever named came from England. Megalosaurus was described by William Buckland in 1824, and its famous jawbone came from Oxfordshire.
4. Iguanodon started with a handful of teeth. They were found in Sussex in 1822, and Mary Ann Mantell and her husband Gideon are recorded as the people who discovered them.
5. A thumb mistaken for a horn. Early scientists put Iguanodon's spike on its nose. Better fossils found in the 1870s showed it was actually a thumb.

Britain's dinosaur story

6. The world's first dinosaur park is in London. The Crystal Palace dinosaurs in south-east London were unveiled in 1854 as the first full-scale models of dinosaurs anywhere. Today they are Grade I listed.
7. Dinner inside a dinosaur. On 31 December 1853, before the models opened, scientists and guests sat down to a banquet inside the mould of one of the Iguanodons.
8. Mary Anning's sea monsters. Mary Anning of Lyme Regis found the first complete Plesiosaurus skeleton in 1823. Her famous finds were marine reptiles, though, not dinosaurs.
9. The heavy claw of Surrey. In 1983 fossil collector William Walker found a huge claw in a clay pit near Ockley. It belonged to a new dinosaur, Baryonyx ("heavy claw"), which is thought to have hooked fish out of rivers. The claw bone measures about 31 cm along its curve.
10. A dinosaur highway in Oxfordshire. A quarry worker driving a digger felt "unusual bumps" in the ground. They turned out to be part of more than 200 footprints, made around 166 million years ago: the UK's biggest dinosaur footprint site.
11. A coast full of time. The rocks of the Jurassic Coast in Dorset and East Devon record 185 million years of Earth's history. It became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2001.

Surprising dinosaur facts

12. T. rex is closer to us than to Stegosaurus. Stegosaurus lived 152 to 145 million years ago. Tyrannosaurus rex lived 68 to 66 million years ago, so a bigger stretch of time separates those two than separates T. rex from today.
13. Velociraptor was turkey-sized. The real animal was about as big as a turkey and covered in feathers, much smaller than the film version.
14. Pterosaurs weren't dinosaurs. The flying reptiles were relatives of the dinosaurs, and they were the first animals with backbones to evolve powered flight.
15. Dinosaurs got everywhere. Palaeontologists have dug up dinosaur fossils on every single continent, Antarctica included.
16. Dippy is a copy. Dippy, the Natural History Museum's famous Diplodocus, is a plaster cast, first unveiled there on 12 May 1905. Diplodocus means "double-beamed", after bones under its tail.
17. Sophie is the real thing. The Museum's Stegosaurus, Sophie, is the most complete Stegosaurus ever found, with more than 300 bones. Stegosaurus means "roof lizard".

Dinosaurs today

18. What happened 66 million years ago. Strong evidence points to a huge asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs, along with pterosaurs, large marine reptiles and ammonites.
19. Except the birds. Birds are living dinosaurs, descended from small meat-eating theropods, the same group T. rex belonged to. That makes every robin in the garden a dinosaur, and every great horned owl too. Einstein the Great Horned Owl is the cuddly version.

Play idea: dinosaur or not?

Read out a list and let your child sort each one into a "dinosaur" box or a "not a dinosaur" box: T. rex, plesiosaur, Iguanodon, pterosaur, Stegosaurus, ichthyosaur, robin. The trick answers are the fun part: three sea and sky reptiles that aren't dinosaurs, and one garden bird that is.

Frequently asked questions

What was the first dinosaur ever named?

Megalosaurus, described by William Buckland in 1824 from fossils found in Oxfordshire.

Are birds really dinosaurs?

Yes. Scientists agree that birds are living dinosaurs, descended from small theropods.

Where can children see dinosaurs in the UK?

The Natural History Museum in London is home to Sophie the Stegosaurus, the Crystal Palace dinosaurs stand in a public park in south-east London, and the Jurassic Coast is famous for its fossils.

Prefer animals that are still around? Browse Douglas® wildlife soft toys in UK stock.