You don’t have to be a little kid to get excited about the Titanosaur, an important (and gigantic!) dinosaur discovery that was made by a rancher in the Patagonia region of Argentina four years ago. A skeletal cast of the marauding behemoth was just unveiled at the American Museum of Natural History last week, where it has been drawing the attention and capturing the imaginations of dinosaur enthusiasts the world over. Based on its bone sizes, scientists have estimated that the creature weighed as much as 70 tons during its lifetime–more than ten times the weight of today’s largest living land animals! The towering display harkens back to a mystifying age, and brings a fantastical, pre-human era back to life.
The following quiz serves to test your knowledge of paleontology, but if you’re not careful, you might learn a few things as well! The questions have been borrowed from Dinosaurs–The Grand Tour by Keiron Pim, an all-encompassing tome that screams of authority and features profiles of over 300 dinosaurs. Laced with helpful field notes from dino-expert and renowned paleontologist Jack Horner, the book packages scientific facts alongside a playful and fun sense of curiosity: from Aardonyx, a lumbering beast that formed a link between two- and four-legged dinosaurs, to Funiceratops, who boasted a deadly pair of horns, the title pairs the latest findings with spectacular illustrations to bring every dinosaur worth knowing about to life.
If you love dinosaurs, we can guarantee that Dinosaurs–The Grand Tour will have plenty to teach you, whether you aced the quiz or found yourself guessing. The book is currently available in hardcover, and will be out in paperback March 16, 2016.
As a small boy in the early 1980s nothing seemed more exciting to Keiron Pim than a visit to the Natural History Museum, where he would gaze up at the Diplodocus skeleton and later depart clutching some little dinosaur-related memento: an eraser shaped like Stegosaurus, a lurid poster of a Jurassic scene, or a book crammed with dino facts. It would have blown his four-year-old mind to know that thirty years later a book on dinosaurs would be his first publication. Keiron, married with three young daughters, is a writer and journalist based in Norfolk, England.
