![]() “Although like a Labrador I guess you could take it out for long regular walks.”īefore you start thinking this sounds like hard work, the best thing is you probably wouldn’t have to worry about cleaning your dinosaurs. “If you have a field it would probably manage to exercise on its own,” says Steve. From my old WDC days #fossilfriday /OngaCiVxHJ “You can imagine developing a field with rough vegetation for it to eat, maarum grass or that sort of thing,” says Steve.įood isn’t the only reason a field would be handy for raising your psittacosaurus, because Steve also thinks you could use it for exercising your pets.Ī mount of Psittacosaurus doing what it normally did…eat. Steve estimates your prehistoric pets would eat about a quarter of their bodyweight a day. The psittacosaurus’s parrot-like beak is thought to be purpose-built for eating rough vegetation (mmm, tasty). You probably wouldn’t be able to feed your new pets any old dog food (Claire Esnault/PA) The sociable nature of these loveable little creatures does have a small caveat though – our expert reckons you would probably need to have a pair of them “to keep them happy”. “They seem to be sociable creatures and that’s got to be good.” “There are wonderful fossils found where you’ve got what seems to be a sort of nanny dinosaur looking after dozens of babies, which can’t all be its own, suggesting they lived as part of a colony,” says Steve. Steve says there’s some evidence that they were sociable “like a meerkat”. This suggests that you need to be careful with them around children, but don’t worry because it does look like they may have had a kinder nature. Psittacosaurus lived in the Early Cretaceous Asia about 125m years ago. This doesn’t mean that they’re as easy to handle as a bunny: Steve warns they could give a nip with their parrot-type beak or possibly do some damage with the spiky protrusions on their tail – sometimes thought to have been used for fighting between males. ![]() Steve says it varied, but generally a psittacosaurus was about the size of a Labrador.īeing small, and mostly herbivorous, they are a safer bet than their carnivorous counterparts too. We had our resident illustrator Claire Esnault draw a picture of our adorable prehistoric pet (Claire Esnault/PA)Īside from being the cutest thing you’ve ever seen, it’s partly the size of these creatures from the early Cretaceous period – about 120-100 million years ago – which makes them such ideal pets. Get ready to meet the new love of your life: the psittacosaurus. Steve said: “You would want something that probably wouldn’t eat you – I guess that’s a reasonably important requirement – and you want something small.” To put their size in context, at his museum Steve has a lump of apatosaur dung three feet across and weighing a whopping 73 kilos. Steve thinks the sheer size of the “Jurassic cows” – giant grazers like the apatosaurus and diplodocus – means they wouldn’t be a good pick either. Steve immediately ruled out the “big meat-eaters” like the T-Rex because, reasonably enough, “it would be too dangerous”. This doesn’t exactly look like an ideal day out in the park (Jorge Gonzalez and Pablo Lara/PA) He was happy to indulge in our dino-fantasies, saying: “I get asked some strange things but this is really taking the biscuit.” So we spoke to paleontologist Steve Davies of Dinosaurland Fossil Museum in Lyme Regis, England to find out what species could replace man’s best friend. Taking a giant T-Rex for walkies around the park might just be a little bit too dangerous, but we figured there must have been at least one dinosaur that would have made the perfect pet, without risking a repeat of Jurassic Park in your backyard. ![]() Imagine if you had a dinosaur as a pet – that would be pretty cool, right?
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