Question: What is your top asked question about dinosaurs

Lucile Crete answered on 25 Apr 2021:

The most asked question I get about dinosaurs is usually “are birds really dinosaurs?”

However, it is often quite funny for me to get questions about dinosaurs, as it is not at all what I work on! But it is often a good opportunity for me to explain that they are many many different specialists that work on fossil bones: those working on human bones (paleo-anthropologists), those working on animal bones (palaeontologists), those working on animal bones in relation to human activities such as hunting or farming (zooarchaeologists)… and within each of these groups of specialists, some will specialise on different things!

For example, I work on animal bones that date from a time when humans were around because I want to know more about what the environment was like for our ancestors, and how climate change might have had an influence on Human Evolution. I never work on dinosaur bones, first because most dinosaurs were extinct during the time period I study, but also because I would not know how to study dinosaur bones! 😉

There are so many animal/dinosaur species that have existed through time that no one could be able to recognise and study all of them! That’s why scientists choose to focus on what they find the most interesting, and then share their findings with the rest of the world! 🙂