We're all familiar with dinosaurs from movies such as Jurassic Park and King Kong, but how much do you really know about dinosaurs? Here are 10 facts about dinosaurs which you can amaze your friends and family with:

1. Dinosaurs first appeared during the Triassic period (248 to 213 million years ago), and were the dominant land animals through the entire Jurassic period, and to the end of the Cretaceous period (65 million years ago).

2. We know about dinosaurs because fossils have been found. The fossils, which are generally found in sedimentary rocks, including fossilized body parts (bones, teeth, skin, claws, etc.), as well as trace fossils ("ichnofossils") which show how the animals lived, which include footprints, burrows, nests, toothmarks, dung, etc.

3. The earth's continents slowly move through a process known as "plate tectonics". When dinosaurs first appeared during the Triassic period, all the earth's continents were joined together in one super-continent known as "Pangea".

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Dinosaurs are well-known and well-loved by children of all ages, but the name still means different things to different people. While that is true that dinosaurs were real and live animals that lived in most regions of the world yet died out 65 million years ago, there is still a lot of doubt surrounding their nature and their ways of life since no man has ever seen a living dinosaur. There is also little proof that dinosaurs lived with or were tamed by our prehistoric ancestors, contrary to what is shown in some TV shows and comic strips. We only know of their existence by their remains, usually documented in bones, either found as complete skeletons or separately. We have also found their footprints in rock, as well as some eggs embedded in them. Most of the bigger dinosaur specimens have now been collected and displayed in larger museums.

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In recent years, there has been an increasing number of dinosaur bones discovered in more and more places around the world. The evidence discovered in the bones tells us that the various dinosaurs we have discovered are not all closely related to one another. Generally, they have evolved along two parallel lines. The differences seen in their arrangement of the teeth in the jaws, as well as the number of hip bones tell us that there have been two main kinds of dinosaur. Each of these kinds includes dinosaurs that used to walk on their hind legs and dinosaurs walked on all fours. The kind that walked on hind legs (and were carnivores) is referred to as the Theropoda, while the latter is called the Sauropoda (plant eaters).
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Many of us will have seen Jurassic Park, the popular film in which an entrepreneur attempted to set up a dinosaur theme park. Away from the fiction, you could take a trip to find out what the Jurassic period was really like.

There's an area on the south coast of England that is known as the Jurassic Coast. Covering some 95 miles of coastline, stretching from Dorset to Devon, this UNESCO World Heritage Site is one of the UK's lesser known gems.

This area has been given its name as a result of the age of the geology in the area. There are exposed rocks that date back some 250 million years - indeed, strictly speaking, they even pre-date the Jurassic geological period.

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An adventure 65 million years in the making… such is the tagline for Jurassic Park, the onscreen adaptation of Michael Crichton's wildly successful novel about the human-aided return of dinosaurs to planet Earth. One of Steven Spielberg's greatest achievements, Jurassic Park was, and remains, a special effects masterpiece unrivaled by its peers. Dinosaurs roam the plains and scour the forests against the backdrop of conductor John Williams's original score (some of the best music of his career, which is saying a lot). Unlike the Godzilla movies of years past, you can't see human hands or construction paper props in the background of this movie.
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