by Perry McCarney

Created on: April 13, 2009   Last Updated: November 24, 2009

Dinosaurs have inspired the imaginations of people, especially fascinating children, since it was first realized that their fossilized remains were not those of giants, ogres, dragons, sea monsters or any other large mythological creature. Although the discovery of their bones in earlier ages may well have stimulated or at least contributed to the creation of legends about such beasts in so many cultures.

As paleontological discoveries progressed and more was known, disinformation and wild surmises spread through the populaces of the more advanced nations far faster than the legitimate facts and hypotheses. This created popular myths that even today are still believed by many. Sensationalist journalism was in its infancy at the start of such discoveries, but was certainly read by far more people than the scientific journals of the day.

The following are some of those myths that, although since debunked, still hold sway with a surprising number of people:

All the large prehistoric animals were dinosaurs

Even during Earth's Mesozoic Era when the dinosaurs lived, many of the larger animals were not a part of the taxonomic super order called Dinosauria. While this period lasting some 160 million years is often referred to as the "Age of the Reptiles" and dinosaurs were indeed reptiles, not all of those reptiles were dinosaurs. The large reptiles of the sky, such as the pterosaurs, and those of the sea, like the plesiosaurs, while reptilian, were not dinosaurs. And large animals such as some of the pelycosaurs, that included the synapsid (mammal-like reptile) sail-finned dimetrodons, existed in the Permian Period, well before dinosaurs evolved. Since the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, other large animals have arisen that are legitimately classed as prehistoric; including the mammalian mammoths, mastodons, cave bears and cave lions our earliest ancestors had to deal with.

All dinosaur species co-existed

Modern man, Homo sapiens sapiens, has existed for a mere 15,000 years or so, and our individual lifetimes rarely exceed 100 years. So perhaps it's unsurprising that we find it difficult to conceive how long 160 million years really is. This length of time allowed the speciation and extinction of a vast number of dinosaur species to occur. Many works of fiction, novels and movies, tend to focus on the last dinosaurs, those living in the Late Cretaceous period, particularly the Tyrannosaurus Rex and the triple-horned and armor plated Triceratops,

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