5

Sauropods Could Bring the Thunder (Literally)

CoreyFord/iStock/Getty Images

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.

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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!!"

4

Crested Dinosaurs Were Musical

Nobu Tamura

We've always dreamed that dinosaurs spoke in either blood-splintering roars or prim-and-proper British accents (our dreams are weird), but medical scans of fossil skulls have shown that parasaurolophus and its relatives had a more sophisticated repertoire. The bony crest on this hadrosaur's head formed a long resonating tube that connected to the nasal cavity -- kind of like a built-in didgeridoo that sounded off with a deep, somber note whenever the animal blew its nose. A team of researchers recreated the sweet dino-song of parasaurolophus via computer simulation:

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.

3

"Velociraptors" Could Hunt Your Ass Down in the Dark

AStrangerintheAlps, via Wikipedia

2

Dinosaurs Could Survive a Polar Winter

DC Productions/Photodisc/Getty Images

1

Dinosaurs Farts Could Change a Planet

CoreyFord/iStock/Getty Images

The dinosaurs were literal badasses.

Some scientists now believe that the dinosaurs dominated the environment using only their weapons-grade farts. You see, big sauropods like apatosaurus spent their entire waking lives horking down tons of plants, and thoroughly chewing all that food would have taken more hours in a day than there actually were. If they didn't have stomach stones to grind all that matter up, it stands to reason that gut bacteria would have stepped in to fill that role -- and gut bacteria produce a lot of globe-warming methane.

Wiki Commons
There's a reason those pterodactyls are flying away.

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.