Dinosaurs come to life at Barton Library

EL DORADO — Dinosaurs roared to life at Dino Day, held recently at the Barton Library.

Guest speaker for the evening was Dr. Nancy Whitmore, a professor of geology at South Arkansas Community College.

Whitmore told the children of her trip to San Antonio where she got to follow the steps of dinosaurs at Dinosaur Trackway at the Government Canyon State Natural Area.

“We have found dinosaur fossils on every continent,” Whitmore said.

“There is not one continent that that we’ve found that doesn’t have fossils.”

Whitmore also discussed different types of dinosaurs, theropods, sauropods, cerapods and ornithopods.

“Dinosaurs came in all shapes and sizes,” she said.

Theropods are dinosaurs that walked on their back legs. They are characterized by their their three toed feet, long sharp teeth, short arms and eating meat. An example of these types of dinosaurs are the Tyrannosaurus Rex.

Sauropods use four legs to walk. They have long necks, long tails and eat plants. An example of this dinosaur is the Brachiosaurus.

Cerapods walk on four legs and have horns and a bony frill like be a Triceratops.

“The frills were there for protection, It made it hard for a meat-eater to bite down on them,” She explained.

Ornithopods walk on just their back legs and were characterized by their crests that many paleontologists believe they used to call to each other.

They were also plant eaters and an an example of this type of dinosaur is a Parasaurolophus.

“The age of dinosaurs was called the Mesozoic Era,” Whitmore said.

She discussed the three parts of the Mesozoic Era, the Triassic period, the Jurassic period and the Cretaceous period.

During the Triassic period – about 248 to 199 million years ago – most of Earth’s land continued to stick together in one big supercontinent, Pangaea.

Because the middle of Pangaea was so far from the oceans, it was very dry there, like a desert.

The whole world was generally pretty warm all through the Triassic period. Even at the North and South poles, there wasn’t any ice.

When the Jurassic period began, about 199 million years ago, a lot of animals had just become extinct in the catastrophe that ended the Triassic period.

This left room for the dinosaurs to have a lot of baby dinosaurs and soon the land on Earth was just covered in all different kinds of dinosaurs. The Jurassic is the main period of the dinosaurs – that’s why they called the movie “Jurassic Park.”

“During the cretaceous period things began to change. There was a lot of volcanic activity. There was a lot of ash in the air and lava flows and lots of changes,” She said.

The Cretaceous was the last period in which dinosaurs walked the planet. Many new plants and flowers appeared. This helped many of the plant eating dinosaurs to flourish.

The exhibit at the library included several dinosaur bone casts and one rib of a Mosasaurus.