What do you call a sleeping dinosaur?
Tap for the Answer!
A dinosnore!
😂 🦕 🤣
The Science Behind the Silliness
What time of day did dinosaurs sleep?
When a dinosaur slept is closely related to their species. Studies have been conducted on numerous species' eyes to determine how much light their eyes let in and this was used as a basis for when they were awake.
Plant eating species were mostly active early in the morning and in the evening - while napping at night and during the main part of the day. Meat eating species were mostly up during the night.
How did they sleep?
When a drowsy raptor, for example, set about going to sleep, the dinosaur probably took a familiar pose. Rare skeletons and trace fossils — or impressions made by once-alive dinosaurs — indicate that at least some dinosaurs shuffled their feet beneath them, folded their arms, and rested their heads on their backs just like some slumbering birds today. Almost a century ago, paleontologist Charles Lewis Camp described the bones of a small, meat-eating dinosaur called Segisaurus found with its arms and legs tucked beneath it.
Multiple other finds have popped up since then. In the Jurassic rock of southern Utah there’s a body impression of a large, Dilophosaurus-like dinosaur that sat down to rest, shuffled forward, and settled in. From the way the dinosaur sat to how it held its hands, this carnivore acted in a very bird-like way despite living over 40 million years before the first birds evolved. Better yet, paleontologists have also described the fossil of a small, raptor-like dinosaur named Mei long that was asleep — curled up and snugly — as ash buried the unfortunate animal. Its name translates to "sleeping dragon."
Did Dinosaurs Lay Down?
Trace fossils could be helpful here. Dinosaurs left their tracks and impressions as well as bones. The trick would be recognizing them. “If some dinosaurs did lie down in fully horizontal positions, the traces of those behaviors might be so big and messy that we would have a tough time recognizing them as trace fossils,” Emory University paleontologist Anthony Martin says. Thinking on dinosaur scale isn’t always easy.
Nevertheless, paleontologists are still picking away at the quieter side of dinosaur lives. Just this month, paleontologists proposed that they’d found traces made by a resting Tyrannosaurus that pushed itself up off the ground with its forearms.
Martin is skeptical of the identification, noting that the traces may be unrelated impressions, but he still is glad other researchers are thinking of dinosaurs doing things other than biting each other. “Dinosaurs weren’t always in constant motion, chasing or being chased,” says Martin. “Sometimes they needed to stop, look, and listen. Or just chill.”
