How do scientists learn about dinosaurs from bones?
Stone Detectives
How do scientists learn about dinosaurs from bones?
Picture a dinosaur. Now realize you've never seen one, no human ever has, and the last one died about 66 million years ago. Yet we know they had feathers, fast feet, and dagger teeth. How? The answer is hiding underground, in stone. Scientists are basically the world's most patient detectives, and bones are their clues.
First, a bone has to survive the impossible. When most animals die, they vanish completely — eaten, rotted, gone. But once in a great while, an animal gets buried fast in mud or sand. Over millions of years, minerals soak into the buried bone and turn it slowly to stone. That stony copy is called a fossil. A fossil isn't really a bone anymore — it's a rock shaped exactly like one.
