Informational Text on Dinosaurs

Informational Text on Dinosaurs

Dinosaurs were a very large and varied group of reptiles prehistoric people who ruled the Earth millions of years ago, long before humans were even about to appear. These animals populated all habitats of the planet: the oceans, the mainland and even crossed the air, throughout 135 million years, from its appearance in the Upper Triassic period to its extinction at the end of the period Cretaceous.

How do we know that dinosaurs existed?

We know that dinosaurs existed because we have found their Fossil remains, that is, their skeletons, their footprints or parts of their bodies, preserved in different mineral substances like stone or amber.

These remains are obtained underground and have been found since the 19th century, showing us extinct creatures but very similar to those that exist today. Thus, over two centuries of study, much is known about these ancient creatures.

What were dinosaurs like?

The term "dinosaur" already tells us a lot about what these animals were like: it is made up of the Greek voices

deinos ("Terrible") and sauros ("Lizard"), from which we can conclude that they were reptiles very different from the ones we are used to. This is because many of the first fossils found revealed large creatures, so much so that many of their early researchers took them for ancient monsters, such as those that appear in the Bible.

The truth is that dinosaurs were a very large and diverse group of animals, of which we know today more than a thousand species different, from all corners of the planet. Some walked on two or four legs, they were herbivores, piscivores, omnivores or carnivores, and competed with other species of prehistoric marine and even flying reptiles, but which are not considered (strictly speaking) as dinosaurs.

Like modern reptiles, dinosaurs laid eggs and probably created nests; but unlike them, the dinosaurs they had an upright posture, with their legs perpendicular to the body instead of to their sides. And although it was thought that they were slow beings and cold blood, many findings seem to indicate that they were much more active and dynamic animals.

What kinds of dinosaurs do we know?

The task of classifying dinosaurs and trying to reconstruct their evolutionary history is for paleontologists, and it is not an easy task. First of all, because all the information we have about dinosaurs comes from the fossil record, so in many cases it is incomplete, fragmentary.

Fortunately, its similarity with the species that accompany us today allows us to carry out comparisons and deductions, and thus we have been able to establish a classification of the known dinosaurs.

This classification depends on the structure of the hip bones of the fossils found and distinguishes between two orders of dinosaurs: the saurischians (Saurischia, which means "lizard pelvis"), whose bones are more similar to those of their ancestors, and ornithischians (Ornithischia, which means "bird pelvis"), which have a more modern structure.

In each of these orders we can find different genera and species of dinosaurs, as follows:

Why did dinosaurs disappear?

There are different possible explanations for the sudden massive disappearance of the dinosaurs, which took place in the late Mesozoic era, 66 million years ago. At that moment 75% of life on the planet was suddenly lost, in what is known as the Cretaceous-Tertiary (or KT) mass extinction event.

The hypothesis handled by scientists point to some kind of global climate catastrophe, the product of sudden and intense seismic and volcanic activity, or consequence of the impact of a asteroid or meteor in the region that today we know as the Yucatan Peninsula, in Mexico. This last explanation is the one that enjoys the greatest acceptance among specialists.

What is an informational text?

A information text or expository It is the one whose task is to provide the reader with data, observations and other information in an objective, concrete and formal way, without giving room for opinions, arguments or stories in its content. It is a very common type of text in the educational world, for example, or in the informative world, such as encyclopedias, textbooks or textbooks. Scientific articles.

Depending on the level of complexity of your language, an informative text can be directed to any type of people (that is, texts informative) or to a professional sector that handles technical knowledge (that is, texts specialized).

References:

• "Dinosauria" in Wikipedia.
• "Informative text" in Wikipedia.
• "The dinosaurs" in Educate.
• "What are Dinosaurs?" on National History Museum (United Kingdom).
• "Dinosaur (fossil reptile)" in The Encyclopaedia Britannica.

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