How the hidden lives of dinosaurs are being revealed by new technology

Dinosaurs dominated the land for around 180 million years. Yet we have little idea what life was like for these prehistoric icons as interpreting fossils that are at least 65 million years old is fiendishly difficult. Finding out more had long seemed impossible. No longer.

In the past few decades, new technologies and new specimens have provided previously unimaginable windows into their behaviour and ecology. This, along with insights from living animals, is finally allowing palaeontologists to build a picture of dinosaur life ranging from parental care, migration and hunting styles to communication, sociality and combat.

David Hone is one of those working to glean more about life in the age of dinosaurs. A palaeontologist at Queen Mary University of London, he has collated the latest findings into a forthcoming book, Uncovering Dinosaur Behavior: What they did and how we know. He gave New Scientist a taste of what has been discovered, from migrating herbivores and semi-aquatic predators to why ostriches are a problem for understanding which dinosaurs doted on their young.

Colin Barras: Some of the largest dinosaurs sauropods such as Diplodocus or Brachiosaurusfor example were nothing like any living animal. How do you even begin to work out how they behaved?

David Hone: One of the most important things we can do as palaeontologists is use our understanding of modern animal ecology and behaviour in a much better way. Mouth shape is a good example. If you’ve got a small mouth, you are usually targeting individual buds or leaves high-nutrition foods. If you…