When Dinosaurs Won't Stay Still: On Wonder, Nephews, and Being Wrong

I've always been the kind of person who clicks on random scientific articles shared by strangers on social media. (Yes, I know, this says everything about both my dopamine receptors and my impulse control.) But last week, that habit led me down a rabbit hole that reminded me why kids fall in love with dinosaurs in the first place, back when I would look forward to going to our small school library to check out every single book about dinosaurs. (We didn't have a county library, which is a story for another time.)

The article in question? A paper published in Nature about whether Nanotyrannus, long dismissed by many paleontologists as just a juvenile T. rex, was actually its own distinct species. Turns out, it was. Not only that, but the research shows these were two entirely different creatures that lived alongside each other in North America right up until the very end.

If you're not a dinosaur nerd, this might not sound earth-shattering. But here's the thing: this means the textbooks need rewriting. Again. The scientific papers need reconsidering. Again. The museum labels need updating. Again. The study itself notes this means rethinking dozens of existing theories that were based on faulty assumptions. (That's science-speak for "oops, we've been getting this wrong.")

And honestly? I kind of love it.

Because here's what hit me as I was reading: I'm in my 40s now, and the dinosaurs of my childhood are not the dinosaurs kids are learning about today. Not even close.

I grew up with those library books showing Brontosauruses standing in swamps because surely something that big couldn't support its own weight on land. (Spoiler: they could, and also, we don't even call them Brontosaurus anymore. Except when I looked that up to double-check myself, turns out we do again, because this stuff is complicated and scientists keep finding new evidence.) The T. rex in those books stood upright like Godzilla, dragging its tail. The dinosaurs were universally scaly, slow, probably cold-blooded, and definitely, definitely dull green or brown.

Then Jurassic Park came out in 1993 and changed everything. Not just the movie, though those special effects were revolutionary, but Michael Crichton's book. I read it a couple years ago (yes, three decades late, don't judge me) and was absolutely floored. Crichton didn't just write a thriller; he wove in actual science, chaos theory, genetics, the ethics of playing God with extinction. The book made me think about dinosaurs differently. Not as museum pieces but as living, breathing animals that existed in complex ecosystems we're still trying to understand.

The movie and book together sparked a renaissance in how we visualized these creatures. If you haven't listened to the 99% Invisible podcast episode "Welcome to Jurassic Art," do yourself a favor. It traces how scientific illustrators and paleontologists collaborated to reimagine what dinosaurs looked like, how they moved, how they lived. Since then, discoveries have only accelerated. Paleontologists now name a new dinosaur species about every two weeks.

Every. Two. Weeks.

China alone has seen a 132% increase in known dinosaur species since 1990, and about half of all new species are now coming from there. We've found dinosaurs with feathers, not just the small raptor-y ones, but big ones too. We've learned about their colors through preserved pigments in fossils. We've discovered they were probably warm-blooded, that they cared for their young, that some of them were shockingly fast.

The Audible podcast "A Grown-Up's Guide to Dinosaurs" by Professor Ben Garrod captures this beautifully. (Yes, I'm that person who listens to paleontology podcasts during my commute. What of it?) Garrod walks through not just what we know now, but how we figured it out. The detective work of reconstructing creatures that died out millions of years ago from fragments of bone and educated guessing.

Here's what gets me: experts estimate more dinosaurs remain undiscovered than have been found. My nephews are completely dinosaur-obsessed, the kind of kids who can pronounce "Pachycephalosaurus" before they can spell "Wednesday." By the time they're my age, they'll likely know about entire groups of dinosaurs we can't even imagine yet. The Late Cretaceous will look different. The Jurassic will be populated with species we've never heard of. And probably, definitely, some things we think we know right now will turn out to be wrong.

That Nanotyrannus study? It's a perfect example. For years, scientists have debated whether these smaller tyrannosaur fossils represented young T. rexes or a separate species. Museums made their best guesses about which interpretation to use. Researchers built theories about T. rex growth patterns and behavior based on those assumptions. And now we know: those assumptions were wrong. Nanotyrannus was out there, doing its own thing, in a world more diverse than we realized.

I find this deeply, almost absurdly comforting.

Not because I enjoy being wrong (I really don't), but because it means we're still learning. We're still discovering. The world is still capable of surprising us, even about things that happened millions of years ago. In an era when it feels like everything is knowable, everything's been documented, everything's been explained to death on Wikipedia, it turns out we don't even know all the dinosaurs yet. Science is helpful precisely because it is an ever-evolving space.

The last time I visited my nephews, they were correcting me about dinosaur facts. "Actually," they said with infinite patience, "that's not how velociraptors looked." They're right, of course. The real ones were smaller and had feathers, and Hollywood lied to us all. But someday, maybe, their own kids will correct them about something we think we know today.

And that's the point, isn't it? Knowledge isn't static. Science isn't a collection of facts to memorize and file away. It's an ongoing conversation, a perpetual refinement, a continuous willingness to say "wait, what if we were wrong about this?"

So yeah, I clicked on a random article about a dinosaur debate on social media, and it reminded me why I loved this stuff as a kid. Not because dinosaurs are "cool" (though they are), but because they represent something fundamental about being human: our endless capacity for wonder, our refusal to stop asking questions, our willingness to be surprised.

Even by things that have been dead for a very, very long time.

References

Zanno, L. E., & Napoli, J. G. (2024). Nanotyrannus and Tyrannosaurus coexisted at the close of the Cretaceous.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41167514/

What dinosaur "fact" from your childhood turned out to be wrong? Or what's something else you've had to unlearn? I'd love to hear about it in the comments.

About Enthusiastic Generalist: This blog explores ideas across disciplines: science, leadership, faith, parenting, book reviews, personal essays, and the occasional deep dive into why dinosaurs are cooler now than they were in the '80s & '90s. It's an eclectic mix of whatever I find interesting about the world. If you enjoyed this post, subscribe for more deep dives into the unexpected connections that make life worth paying attention to.