Somehow, I recently watched Jurassic Park for the first time ever. Like many, I was immediately enamored by its iconic score (thank you, John Williams), incredible animatronics, and Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum; most of all, however, the movie rekindled my childhood passion for dinosaurs. Undeniably, the prospect of interacting with near-scientifically accurate, living dinosaurs is tantalizing, and would have fulfilled all the dreams I’d held close since childhood. While the morally problematic and scientifically precarious implications of breeding dinosaurs prevent this, modern technology allows us to connect with dinosaurs in other ways, thankfully reducing the chances of getting devoured by a Tyrannosaurus rex on the toilet to zero.
Developed by California paleontologist Ian Webster, this interactive map allows you to safely, ethically, and accurately picture what it would be like to coexist with dinosaurs by discovering which kinds once lived in your region. Simply input any city or town of interest into its search bar and it will provide you with a list of its former reptilian inhabitants. (If your city doesn’t appear, try searching for a bigger city nearby.) If you click on any of the listed underlined dinosaur names, you can learn more about each one and what they looked like. You can also adjust the time period settings to whichever prehistoric period most interests you using the “Jump to…” dropdown menu. To find the most familiar dinosaurs, however, I would set the time period to one out of the three periods in the Mesozoic Era: the Triassic, Jurassic, or Cretaceous.
For example, the Lexovisaurus, Pliosaurus, Megalosaurus, Rhomaleosaurus, and Parapsicephalus all roamed St Andrews during the Jurassic Period. The Lexovisaurus is a type of stegosaurus, with its trademark spiny back and pointy tail. The stegosaurus had a brain the size of a walnut, which, in relation to its body size, indicates that it was unfortunately most likely one of the least intelligent dinosaurs. The Pliosaurus and Rhomaleosaurus were both plesiosaurs, a carnivorous marine mammal which isn’t actually a dinosaur; they both bear a striking resemblance to the Loch Ness Monster. This isn’t actually a coincidence, since plesiosaur fossils found in Loch Ness have stirred rumors that the Loch Ness Monster is really just an existent plesiosaur. The Megalosaurus looks a lot like the Tyrannosaurus rex; however, in actuality, the Megalosaurus is only about a quarter of the T. rex’s size. Although it doesn’t attract nearly as much attention as the T. rex, the Megalosaurus was one of the first dinosaurs to be displayed, not even escaping a mention in Charles Dickens’s Bleak Hill: “It would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.” Like the Pliosaurus and Rhomaleosaurus, the Parapsicephalus is not a type of dinosaur either, but a pterosaur, which is a type of flying reptile. Pterosaurs were the world’s first flying vertebrae, and ranged in size from crow-sized to the height of giraffes: the Parapsicephalus was not too large, however, with a wingspan of only three feet. The website is a bit like an internal time machine: it’s absurdly cool to picture a Lexovisaurus grazing where Younger Hall stands now or a Rhomaleosaurus swimming near East Sands.
You can also use this dinosaur database to discover the opposite: which dinosaurs lived where. For example, if I was curious where my favorite dinosaur (Ankylosaurus) lived, by searching its name or finding it on the website’s exhaustive list of 1,365 dinosaurs, I could find out where it would have walked in the present day (Montana, Colorado, and Canada).
Of course, no discussion surrounding dinosaurs can exist without mentioning the fact that we’re surrounded by living dinosaurs today: birds. Paleontologists have noticed skeletal, anatomical, and behavioral similarities between birds and dinosaurs: some had beaks, wings, and feathers, while others mirrored modern-day nesting patterns. Eventually, it became undeniable that birds had to be taxonomically classified as dinosaurs in the same way bats have to be taxonomically classified as mammals. Birds belong to the theropod clade, which ironically includes the Tyrannosaurus rex. Although it is difficult to scientifically determine which birds today are most closely related to the dinosaurs, it’s impossible to look at a cassowary—at its talons and eyes alone—without feeling some kind of primal urge to run. So, the next time you see a bird, remind yourself that you’re looking at what is technically a living, breathing dinosaur.