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Ever wonder what it would be like to have your head bitten off by the real live dinosaur? Then go see Sue. Sue is the most complete Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton ever found. What this means is when you are comparing the size of Sue's teeth to the size of your head you are looking at the real deal. Not somebody's idea of what it might look like if we could only find an intact dinosaur skeleton. One has been found so when you stand beside the huge thigh bones of one of the largest predators the earth has ever seen, you can thank your lucky stars that there are no time machines as yet and that no one has been dumb enough to clone and let lose a T-REX-to knock us off the top of the food chain.

Sue the dinosaur was named after the person who discovered it, namely Sue Hendrickson. No one knows if the dinosaur is male or female. Ironically, at one point in the dinosaur's history the Sioux Indians actually sued for custody of Sue. Go figure.

Sue the dinosaur is 13 feet high and 42 feet long. You could have tried out running the dinosaur. Running would probably have made the T-Rex hungry. I suppose you could have tried shooting it. But that would really make the dinosaur angry.

It is instructive for dinosaur enthusiasts to visit the Dino Dictionary web page http://www.dinodictionary.com/ dinos_spg3.asp. The first surprising thing to notice that is that many dinosaurs are not much bigger than the average human. Several are even smaller. Given that some of the smaller carnivores where considered the smarter dinosaurs they might have given us a run for our money in the evolutionary sweepstakes. If we couple that with the fact that they would not mind eating us at all whilst humans in general, don't find carnivores all that appetizing, we might have been in real trouble.

The big surprise when your peruse the Dino Dictionary comes when you get to the Thunder Lizards. In particular when you encounter the SuperSaurus. They are so big that they could literally squash us without noticing. They are 65 feet tall, 120 feet long and weigh 120,000 lbs.

The second surprise was that I could not find a "Brontosaurus" in this dictionary of dinosaurs. Puzzled, I Googled Brontosaurus, he of Fred Flintstone fame, and found that the Brontosaurus was a fraud. If you do much study on the history of paleontology you can come across quite a few frauds.

One of the strangest ideas I encountered is the notion that caterpillars caused the extinction of dinosaurs. Some people used to think that caterpillars stripped off all the vegetation and the big lizards starved to death. I don't know of a single person who believes that today. Volcanic eruptions and meteor strikes are more exciting, louder and generally more accepted as the route to doomsday for the Thunder Lizards.

Learn more about this author, Michael Skinner.
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