Top 12 Dinosaur Finds of All Time

Hundreds of years ago, we thought they were dragon carcasses. The truth was even more bizarre: A planet full of super-size creatures that ruled for 160 million years.

In the opinion of some of the world's top paleontologists, ranked in conjunction with Discovery Channel Canada newsroom staffers - here are our picks for the top dino finds of all time:

1. The dino-bird link
The notion that birds may be related to dinosaurs has actually been around for 100 years. But strong proof for the theory really started to reach critical mass in the 1970s and 1980s.

"Troodon - the largest-brained dinosaur with its stereoscopic vision and hands capable of manipulating things - gives us a lot of understanding about the transition from theropod dinosaurs into birds."

That's what Canadian paleontologist Philip Currie, one of the key proponents of the dino-bird link, told DiscoveryChannel.ca.

2. The first dino ever discovered
"The earliest finds were some of the most important, when scientists recognized these animals for what they were," says David Evans, Associate Curator in Vertebrate Paleontology at Toronto's Royal Ontario Museum. "The famous mistake that the early paleontologist Mantell made was to put the thumb spike of this animal on the nose," he says. The lizard-like appearance yielded the dino's name - Iguanodon. Though Mantell and others originally thought Iguanodon walked on all-fours, this is closer to current thinking on how many dinos moved.


3. T-rex soft tissue in-tact
After three years of excavating, researchers from the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Montana, claimed their prize, a 70-million-year-old thighbone with what appears to be blood vessels, cells, and proteins involved in the formation of bone.

The find brought the question of whether or not we'll ever be able to clone dinosaurs back to the forefront: "Do you think we'll ever be able to engineer dinosaurs? Yes, but not the extinct species," Jack Horner, one of the world's most famed dino-hunters, told DiscoveryChannel.ca. Horner, who worked on the specimen with Mary H. Schweitzer of North Carolina State University in Raleigh, says he thinks we will be able to engineer characteristics and behaviors of dinosaurs.

"What technology and genetic sources do we already have at our disposal to make this a reality? Bird DNA. Birds are the descendants of dinosaurs, and carry various ancestral genes, as well as developing through ancestral characteristics during embryonic growth. What do we still need to get, or improve on? Figuring out which genes to switch on, and how to switch them. What are the major roadblocks? None other than time for experiments."


4. Dino mummies with in-tact stomach contents
Dinosaur "mummies" are exceedingly rare - even rarer amongst this handful of specimens with fossilized skin and organs still in-tact is a specimen with stomach contents preserved in a fossilized stomach.

Such is the case with "Leonardo" a Brachylophosaurus with 90 per cent of his skin and organs in-tact - more than any other dino discovered.

5. Ground-penetrating radar (allowed digs to commence before a tool ever hit the ground)
First widely used in the early 1990s, this technique lets paleontologists image fossils while they're still in the ground.

This gets the researchers a better idea of where they need to dig to excavate them and even being able to study the remnants of the animal to a degree without even having to dig.




6. "Sue" the most complete T-rex skeleton
A poster-child for the excitement that dinosaurs inspire, "Sue", named in 1990 after paleontologist Sue Hendrickson, is the largest, best-preserved, most complete fossilized skeleton of a t.rex.

"Sue" is also the most expensive, reported to have been bought for US$8 million.





7. "Lyuba" the frozen mammoth with skin and fur still in-tact
"Lyuba" is not only the best-preserved pre-historic animal ever found (with real skin, fur, organs and other tissues in-tact (not just fossilized) but the baby mammoth also raises the question of cloning.

While many experts insist a real-life "Jurassic Park" won't be possible in the near future - if ever - the same researchers admit that a "Stone Age Park" with cloned mammoths, saber-tooth tigers and other ice-age beasts may be possible.




8. The quest for the largest dinosaur ever
You can't really define one dinosaur from another as "biggest" - though many paleontologists agree you can break the search down to three categories: biggest, longest, heaviest.

The winners so far (guess which is which) are: seismosaurus, Argentinosaurus, and ultrasaurus.



9. Hollywood CGI
Jurassic Park revolutionized how dinosaur recreations are presented, but more specifically, the groundbreaking computer generated dinosaurs in the movie did so.

The technology quickly made its way into science documentaries such as the Walking With Dinosaurs series. You could argue that computer animations are a dinosaur's best publicist.


10. Dinos moved in herds
Not only did these creatures - from big sauropods to carnivorous hunting machines - gallop along in packs and herds, seldom alone. They also rarely - if ever - dragged their tales like their early stop-motion movie counterparts.

Some of the strongest evidence that dinosaurs almost always moved in groups is their tendency to die in groups - such as bone beds in the Alberta and Montana badlands, where dozens lay together.


11. They weren't necessarily stupid
Though we're a long way from decoding dinosaur brains even to the extent that we have with dolphins, whales, or even chimps, gone is the image of the dopey stegosaurus, with golf ball-sized brains.

In fact, many carnivorous dinosaurs had impressive vision and hunting techniques, as well as the ability to grasp and manipulate small objects.



12. Dino eggs with embryos intact
Paleontologists have gathered eggs, even whole nests and long suspected many of the in-tact ones could yield imagery of the embryos inside. In 2005, researchers at the University of Toronto uncovered two embryos in a series of eggs discovered in Africa.

The embryos revealed - among other things - that the 190-million-year old animals (Massospondylus carinatus) were born on all-four legs, not two as paleontologists previously thought.

Sources : Discovery Channel