6 Dinosaurs We Just Found Out Had X-Men Powers

The apatosaurus was basically a slow-moving magnitude-4 earthquake. Paleontologist Philip Currie teamed up with Microsoft computer wizard Nathan Myrhvold to create a computer model of a living one, and together they found that the dinosaur's extremely long, tapered tail could be whipped at supersonic speeds -- a theory bolstered by the fact that the apatosaurus fossils they examined had an area of fused vertebrae near the end of the tail, indicating repeated stress. What does all this mean? Well, have you ever gone to a circus and seen a performer put on a show with a bullwhip? And do you remember the loud crack the whip made when snapped? That's because the loop of the whip breaks the sound barrier and produces a miniature sonic boom. Now, take that crack and amplify it by a factor of apatosaurus.

BananaStock/BananaStock/Getty Images
This basically entails hitting multiply over and over until the calculator breaks.

Of course, other paleontologists say the bullwhip theory is a bunch of bunk, and to those paleontologists we say, "Shhh, it's better this way. Some truths are not meant for man."

But just in case they're right, we feel obligated to supply you with equally awesome backup information: Brontomerus, rather cruelly translated to "thunder thighs," is a species of sauropod recently discovered in Utah. It had a massive bone in the upper part of its hip, and where there's a massive bone, there are also massive muscles attached to it. If apatosaurus was the dinosaurs' answer to Indy, brontomerus was their Pele: While most sauropods looked like defenseless walking buffets of exposed neck meat, scientists believe that if you were to call a brontomerus "thunder thighs" to its face, you could have found yourself on the receiving end of a full-bore dinosaur punt, pictured here, in the single best paleontological rendering ever commissioned.

Francisco Gascó, via Smithsonian
"I SAID I'M SENSITIVE ABOUT MY FIGURE!!"

The skull scans also showed that these bands of musical dinosaurs probably had the brainpower necessary to use these calls for communication (for mating, of course). We'll never know how advanced their musical talents might have been, but we're going to go out on a limb here and speculate that some lucky lady parasaurolophus was once serenaded by the fiercest saxophone solo this side of George Michael's Careless Whisper.

Dinosaurs, lizards, and birds all have bony rings in their eyes that we mammals lack, and by comparing the dimensions of the ones in deinonychus' and other raptors' eyes with those of today's animals, researchers were able to determine that they were a bunch of prehistoric Sam Fishers.

Ryosuke Motani and Lars Schmitz
The fossilized black mesh suit may have tipped them off as well.

But raptors weren't the only ones stalking the Mesozoic by moonlight -- other predators had night vision, too, like the troodon, which evolved super-wide eyes in order to see in the dark of a polar winter. Oh, that reminds us! We almost forgot to mention that ...

Even though many researchers agree that at least some dinosaurs were warm-blooded, most of us still imagine them living exclusively in swamps and deserts and tropical island theme parks. After all, everybody knows it was an ice age that killed them off for good.

20th Century Fox
They had to die so that Ray Romano's career could continue to live.

But think about that for a second. Dinosaurs ruled the Earth for 180 million years, which is nearly three times as long as we puny mammals have reigned since. So it's hard to believe that there was any environment on Earth that they couldn't eventually adapt to. And indeed, a little bit of nippy air wasn't about to stop the dinosaurs: Back in the day, Alaska was positively crawling with troodon, as well as larger predators like nanuqsaurus, T. rex's smaller parka-wearing cousin from the north, whose name means "polar bear lizard."

Via The Times of India
Fur is murderer.

Grazing herds of large plant-eaters are also thought to have settled up north year-round. During the Reign of the Ice Dinosaurs (dibs on the Syfy original movie title), the Alaskan landmass wasn't as cold as its modern-day counterpart, but these dinosaurs still would've endured three whole months of snow and ice. It seems that, just like mammals, dinosaurs were adaptable enough to live anywhere they damn well pleased. And if they decided that the whole world was getting a bit too chilly for their liking, well, that's nothing a gargantuan monster-fart can't fix.

W-what?

A team of researchers led by David Wilkinson compared the stink-to-body-mass ratios of today's animals with the size of dinosaurs and estimated that sauropods alone pumped 520 million tons of methane into the Jurassic atmosphere per year. Just for reference, that's roughly the same amount as every single methane source on the planet today -- including artificial emissions from human activity -- all coming from just one group of reptilian buttholes.

Current Biology
Whoever drew that last bar in brown is our kind of scientist.

During the Jurassic period, volcanoes were blowing up all willy-nilly, and rising carbon levels made things hotter, wetter, and overall more plant-friendly. More abundant plants led to bigger, hungrier dinosaurs, whose gargantuan gastric systems spewed even more greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, allowing even more plants to thrive. That's right: The dinosaurs terraformed a whole planet with farts.

When Mr. Yee isn't checking his closet for velociraptors hiding in the dark, he's probably writing his fortune cookie of the day and trying to get somebody to buy his T-shirts.

Related Reading: Hey, did you know some crazy people have written dinosaur erotica? We've covered the shit out of that. We've also revealed some truly bizarre dinosaurs you won't believe existed. And if you're interested in some wild scenes preserved by fossils, we've got you covered.

And to further straighten out your noggin, check out Cracked's De-Textbook: The Stuff You Didn't Know About the Stuff You Thought You Knew.