Like almost any youngster, my love of dinosaurs was deeper than a tar pit and wider than the Cretaceous. Also like many, my love of dinosaurs and desire to learn about them faded before I reached the age when certain questions occurred to me. Sure it’s cool to know how dinosaurs killed and how they died, but did you ever stop to wonder how they lived? And did any of your elementary school teachers ever tell you how dinosaurs loved?Almost certainly not. But as you get older, taboos give way to titillation and finally it was time to learn how the progenitors of the birds (but not the bees) got it on.My quest to get the lowdown on Pterandon Juans took me all the way to the dizzying heights of things buried in the ground—the American Museum of Natural History on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. I sat down for a chat with Dr. Mark Norell, the chairman of the paleontology division. He patiently explained what we know and what we’re still guessing about when it comes to the life and death of terrible lizards, and brought me up to speed on the breakthrough in raptor coloration from just a few days ago. He didn’t blink when I asked him to speculate on Apatosaurus penis size or kept bringing up what Tyrannosaurus probably tasted like, and he was more than polite when I made a Marc Bolan joke.How much do we know about dinosaurs’ lives and behavior?We know a lot, but we don’t know that much. When it comes down to it, we can find out about their behaviors through the fossil record. But the fossil record usually doesn’t preserve acts—things that are going on. So we have to look at traces of those things.Read the rest at Motherboard.
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