49 Fun Facts About Jurassic

The Jura Mountains, which gave the Jurassic its name, straddle France's border with which country?

Switzerland. Rocks of this age were first studied in the limestone of the Jura range, so the whole period took the mountains' name.

Which period came immediately before the Jurassic?

The Triassic. It ended in a mass extinction about 201 million years ago, which cleared the way for dinosaurs to dominate the Jurassic.

Which period followed the Jurassic?

The Cretaceous. It ended about 66 million years ago, when an asteroid struck near Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula and wiped out every dinosaur except the birds.

Which famous dinosaur evolved more than 60 million years after the Jurassic ended?

Tyrannosaurus rex lived 68 to 66 million years ago, so less time separates it from us than from any dinosaur of the Jurassic.

The Jurassic is the second period of which era?

The Mesozoic. Its name means 'middle life', because its fossils fall between the ancient forms of the Paleozoic and the modern ones of the Cenozoic.

By the start of the Jurassic, the supercontinent Pangaea had begun splitting into which two landmasses?

Laurasia and Gondwana. Laurasia in the north went on to become North America and Eurasia, while Gondwana broke into the southern continents and India.

Which feature of today's Earth did the Jurassic world lack?

Polar ice caps. Rocks of the period show no evidence of major glaciation, a sign that the Jurassic world was far warmer than today's.

Which Jurassic dinosaur, described from bones found in Oxfordshire, was the first dinosaur ever named?

Megalosaurus. It got its name in 1824, almost twenty years before the word dinosaur existed, and was first pictured as a giant lizard 20 metres long.

Which fossils are the primary index fossils used to divide Jurassic rocks into stages and zones?

Ammonites. They evolved so quickly that each species lasted only a short time, so finding one pins a rock layer to a narrow slice of the Jurassic.

The eruptions that opened the Jurassic came as Pangaea began tearing apart to form which ocean?

The Atlantic. Lava from the widening rift, the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province, still lines the eastern United States and Morocco and is tied to the extinction that opened the Jurassic.

Which naturalist's name for the Jura limestone, 'Jura-Kalkstein', grew into the word Jurassic?

Alexander von Humboldt. He named the Jura's limestone in the 1790s, but it was a Frenchman, Alexandre Brongniart, who turned his label into Jurassic three decades later.

Which fossil hunter dug Jurassic sea-reptile skeletons from the cliffs of Lyme Regis in the early 1800s?

Mary Anning. She was barely a teenager when she dug out her first great skeleton, yet as a woman she could never join the Geological Society of London.

Which Jurassic dinosaur name, dropped in 1903 as a duplicate of Apatosaurus, was revived by a 2015 study?

Brontosaurus. For over a century scientists treated it as a mislabelled Apatosaurus while museums and films kept the name alive, and some experts still reject its comeback.

Which is the only Jurassic stage named from Greek mythology rather than a place?

Tithonian. Albert Oppel named it after Tithonus, lover of the dawn goddess Eos, because the stage sits at the dawn of the next geological period.

Which Early Jurassic predator did the film Jurassic Park give a venomous spit and neck frill that no fossil supports?

Dilophosaurus. The real animal was far larger than the film's version, among the biggest land predators of its day, and its fossils show no sign of a frill or venom.

Kimmeridge Clay, a Jurassic mudstone named after a Dorset village, is a major source of the oil beneath which sea?

The North Sea. Oil lies under Kimmeridge itself too, where a 'nodding donkey' pump on the cliffs above the bay has been running since the early 1960s.

During the Jurassic, which vertebrates dominated the skies?

Pterosaurs. Often mistaken for flying dinosaurs, they were a separate group of reptiles whose wings were skin stretched from one hugely lengthened finger.

The first birds appeared in the Jurassic, evolving from which group of dinosaurs?

Theropods. Oddly, birds did not arise from the 'bird-hipped' dinosaurs but from the 'lizard-hipped' line of two-legged hunters that includes Velociraptor.

Archaeopteryx lived in the Late Jurassic in what is now which country?

Germany. Its fossils come from limestone quarried in the south of the country for printing plates, a stone so fine-grained that it preserved the animal in exquisite detail.

Archaeopteryx was first named in 1861 from what kind of fossil?

A single feather. It was the first fossil feather ever found, and scientists still argue over whether it came from the same animal as the skeletons that later took the name.

Archaeopteryx was roughly the size of which living bird?

A Eurasian magpie. For all its bird-like wings, it kept a reptile's toothed jaws, clawed fingers and long bony tail.

Which Late Jurassic rock formation of the American West is famous for its wealth of dinosaur skeletons?

The Morrison. Its beds are the mud and sand of ancient rivers and floodplains, which buried the bones of the giants that lived along them.

Which two rival palaeontologists fought the 'Bone Wars' over Jurassic fossil beds?

Othniel Marsh and Edward Cope. Their ruthless race to outdo each other ended up giving science more than 130 new dinosaur species.

Besides dinosaur bones, Jurassic river sandstones of the American Southwest fuelled a 1950s mining boom in which ore?

Uranium. The ore had gathered in the sands of ancient river channels, and Cold War demand for nuclear fuel and weapons set off a prospecting rush across the region.

Which group of dinosaurs became the dominant large herbivores and the largest land animals ever in the Jurassic?

Sauropods. Scientists once assumed giants like Apatosaurus had to wade in swamps to support their bulk, an idea later research overturned: they lived on dry land.

Which Jurassic giant had front legs longer than its hind legs, giving its back a giraffe-like upward slope?

Brachiosaurus. Its name means 'arm lizard' after those long forelimbs, though the animal most books show under that name was long its African look-alike, Giraffatitan.

Andrew Carnegie gave plaster casts of which Jurassic dinosaur skeleton to museums around the world, starting with London in 1905?

Diplodocus. King Edward VII had asked for a copy of the skeleton in Carnegie's Pittsburgh museum, and the London cast became a national favourite nicknamed Dippy.

Which Late Jurassic dinosaur is known for kite-shaped plates along its back and spikes on its tail?

Stegosaurus. Its tail spikes are known as a thagomizer, a word invented as a joke in a 1982 Far Side cartoon and later taken up by palaeontologists.

A towering Giraffatitan skeleton, dug from Jurassic rocks in Tanzania before the First World War, stands in a museum in which city?

Berlin. Tanzania was then part of German East Africa, and expeditions from the city's natural history museum began shipping the bones home in 1909.

Which meat-eater was the commonest big predator of the Late Jurassic American West?

Allosaurus. Its name means 'different lizard', because its discoverer thought its backbones were unlike those of any dinosaur then known.

Which two groups of marine reptiles ruled Jurassic seas?

Ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs. Rare fossils show ichthyosaurs giving birth to live young, so they never had to leave the water to lay eggs.

Leedsichthys, the largest bony fish ever known, cruised Jurassic seas feeding in the same way as which living giant?

Whale shark. Leedsichthys strained plankton through its gills, and its bones are so fragmentary that estimates of its length once ran from 9 metres to 30.

Which living reptiles had Jurassic relatives that took to the open sea?

Crocodiles. Their sea-going Jurassic cousins, the metriorhynchids, lost their armour and grew paddle-like limbs and a tail fluke.

The towering cliffs of Utah's Zion National Park are made of what, hardened into rock since the Early Jurassic?

Desert sand dunes. Winds piled them into a vast sand sea, and mineral-laden water later cemented the grains into the Navajo Sandstone.

Early Jurassic Prosalirus is thought to be the first of which animals with a skeleton built for hopping?

Frogs. Its long hip, hind-leg and ankle bones match those of living frogs, showing it could already jump in the days of the earliest Jurassic dinosaurs.

A furry Jurassic swimmer from China is named after the scaly tail it shared with which living animal?

Beaver. Castorocauda means 'beaver tail', and the fossil showed mammal relatives were swimming 164 million years ago, when they were thought to be confined to land.

Which small Jurassic hunter was so bird-like that a skeleton of Archaeopteryx was at first mistaken for one?

Compsognathus. Darwin's ally Thomas Huxley set the two animals side by side to argue that birds are descended from dinosaurs.

Jurassic seas turned much of which continent into a scatter of islands?

Europe. Sea levels stood far higher than today, so warm, shallow water flooded the lowlands and left only the high ground standing as islands.

Which squid-like animals left the bullet-shaped fossil guards common in Jurassic rocks?

Belemnites. For centuries people took the pointed guards for thunderbolts flung down from the sky during storms.

Which reptile is the only living member of the rhynchocephalians, the commonest small reptiles of the Jurassic?

Tuatara. Despite looking like a lizard it is not one: it is the last survivor of an order that thrived among the dinosaurs, and now lives only in New Zealand.

Which group familiar today has left no widely accepted Jurassic fossils?

Flowering plants. As far as the fossils show, Jurassic dinosaurs never saw a flower: the group spread only in the following period, into a world of ferns, cycads and conifers.

Which tree, common on city streets, is the only living species of an order that flourished in the Jurassic?

Ginkgo. Its fan-shaped leaves have barely changed since the Jurassic, earning it the label 'living fossil', and people carried it from China to streets around the world.

Kulindadromeus, a small plant-eating dinosaur from Jurassic Siberia, surprised scientists by having what?

Protofeathers. Feathery fuzz had been known only in meat-eating dinosaurs, so finding it on a distant plant-eater suggested it may have run through the whole dinosaur family.

An asteroid that struck near the end of the Jurassic left a giant crater now buried beneath which African desert?

The Kalahari. Drillers later pulled a 25 cm piece of the asteroid itself from deep inside the Morokweng crater, a rare survivor of so violent an impact.

Ghawar, the giant oil field, draws its crude from Jurassic limestone beneath which country?

Saudi Arabia. Ghawar's discovery in 1948 is what turned the kingdom into a leading oil country.

A crested Early Jurassic predator nicknamed 'Elvisaurus' was the first meat-eating dinosaur discovered on which continent?

Antarctica. Cryolophosaurus means 'frozen crested lizard', and its forward-swept crest looked so like a pompadour that it earned the Elvis nickname.

Middle Jurassic dinosaur footprints, rare anywhere in the world, are scattered along the shores of which Scottish island?

Isle of Skye. Long-necked plant-eaters and two-legged hunters left the tracks about 170 million years ago as they waded through a muddy, shallow lagoon.

England's fossil-rich 'Jurassic Coast' was awarded which international status in 2001?

World Heritage Site. Erosion has exposed 185 million years of rock in an almost unbroken sequence, so a walk along the shore runs forward through time.

A Wyoming roadside cabin built from thousands of Jurassic dinosaur bones was advertised as the world's what?

Oldest building. Its builder had gathered the bones at nearby Como Bluff hoping to mount a dinosaur skeleton; told he had no complete animal, he built a cabin from them in the 1930s instead.