6 Awesome Dinosaur Species

You may have heard of the lizard tyrant Tyrannosaurus rex. Or maybe the giant Apatosaurus is more your style. But there are literally hundreds of species of lesser-known dinosaurs. Here are six more species to know about.

6. Pachycephalosaurus

Pachycephalosaurus, a dinosaur from the late Cretaceous period. A herbivore with a distinctive, thick, dome-shaped skull and a low-pointed snout.

Pachycephalosaurus is great because it wears a nice hat. This dinosaur had a bony dome on top of its head, sometimes with bizarre knobs or spikes. For a time, it was thought that these domes were used for head-butting, like modern rams' horns. but it is not the truth. These domes are not designed to crack. They may simply be for species identification or display. In other words – a bone hat.

5. Titanosaurus

Dreadnoughtus, late Mesozoic dinosaur, titanosaur, sauropod dinosaur

Dreadnoughtus, the largest dinosaur whose size can be reliably calculated. A very complete fossil of this sauropod was unearthed in 2009. In life, Dreadnought was 26 meters (85 feet) long and weighed about 65 tons.

Dreadnoughtus Schrani was discovered in Argentina and is believed to be the largest land animal ever to live on Earth. This giant sauropod dinosaur flourished during the late Cretaceous period (100.5 million to 66 million years ago). It is about 26 meters (85 feet) long and weighs about 59 metric tons (about 65 tons) – more than a dozen African elephants! Its name literally means "fearless", and it's thought that the herbivore's massive size leaves it free of few, if any, predators as an adult. Astonishing!

4. Velociraptor

Velociraptor, a dinosaur from the late Cretaceous period. This ferocious predator has huge sickle-shaped claws on the second toe of its feet.

Contrary to what Jurassic Park would have you believe, although velociraptors could reach lengths of up to 1.8 meters (6 feet), they were not much larger than turkeys, standing less than 0.6 meters (2 feet) tall. However, their signature scythe-like claws on their second toes and their agile and agile hunting abilities still make them formidable predators. Even at their smaller size, humans would still have a hard time fending off a hungry velociraptor.

3. Ankylosaurus

Ankylosaurus is an over-engineered creature that looks too good to be true. With spikes on its head and sides, an armored plate covering its back, and a giant bone club at the end of its tail, it was better able to ward off predators than the ornately armored Stegosaurus. Imagine a giant combination of a turtle and a rhinoceros. Paradoxically, this coolest dinosaur didn't appear in many movies until Jurassic World. Do you know why? Whenever you see a fight between a T-Rex and some hapless Triceratops, once the T-Rex hides behind the frill, it's all over. You can't hide behind the Ankylosaurus. Get into its blind spot and you'll be hit in the face by its massive bone club. There's no fair fight with an Ankylosaurus.

2. Compsognathus

Compsognathus, a dinosaur from the late Jurassic period. It was a fast and agile predator and one of the smallest known dinosaurs.

Small members of the genus Compsognathus are remarkable for their extraordinary sense of scale. About the size of a turkey, they were much smaller than their theropod cousins the tyrannosaurus, but they had the same graceful raptor proportions, swooping down on their lithe hind legs to capture smaller creatures. (They ate lizards, as evidenced by specimens found inside the thorax of a fossil.) Compsognathus' size and whippet-like body shape strongly hint at an evolutionary continuum between birds and dinosaurs. The fact that fossils of a related species have well-preserved primitive feathers suggests that Compsognathus may have had them too.

1. Therizinosaurus

Therizinosaurus, theropod, dinosaur

Therizinosaurus is a terrifying-looking late Cretaceous theropod dinosaur from Asia and North America. Despite their nightmarish Freddy Krueger claws, they're probably not carnivorous. These unusual dinosaurs had a small skull and leaf-shaped teeth, but lacked teeth in the front half of the upper jaw.

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