Gentle Giants: A Cozy Guide to Plant-Eating Dinosaurs

When people picture dinosaurs, they usually picture teeth. But most dinosaur species we know of were plant-eaters, and many of them were huge, slow, and probably spent most of the day doing what cows do: eating.

Here's a gentle tour of the herbivores, the dinosaurs you'd most want to share a valley with.

First, a little time travel

Dinosaurs lived through the Mesozoic Era, which is split into three periods:

• Triassic (about 252 to 201 million years ago): the first dinosaurs appear
• Jurassic (about 201 to 145 million years ago): the age of the giant long-necks
• Cretaceous (about 145 to 66 million years ago): ends with the asteroid impact

Those spans are so long that dinosaurs didn't all live together. Stegosaurus lived around 150 million years ago, and Tyrannosaurus rex around 68 to 66 million years ago. That means T. rex lived closer in time to us than to Stegosaurus.

Brachiosaurus: the giraffe of the Jurassic

A sauropod, one of the long-necked giants. Unlike many of its relatives, Brachiosaurus had front legs longer than its back legs, so its body sloped upward like a giraffe's. It could browse treetops far higher than any animal alive today.

Sauropods were the largest animals ever to walk on land. They probably swallowed leaves without much chewing and let their huge guts do the work.

Diplodocus and Brontosaurus: the long ones

Diplodocus was extraordinarily long, with much of that length in a whip-like tail. Some scientists think it could crack the tail like a whip.

Brontosaurus has a famous comeback story. For about a century it was thought to be the same animal as Apatosaurus, so the name was dropped. A detailed study in 2015 argued it was different enough to be its own genus again, and many palaeontologists now use the name once more.

Stegosaurus: plates and spikes

Instantly recognisable from the two rows of tall plates along its back and the four spikes on its tail. Scientists still debate what the plates were for: display, recognising each other, temperature control, or a mix.

The tail spikes have a wonderful informal name, the thagomizer. It comes from a Far Side cartoon and was later picked up by palaeontologists.

Despite its size, Stegosaurus had a famously small brain for its body.

Triceratops: the three horns

One of the last non-bird dinosaurs, living at the very end of the Cretaceous, alongside T. rex. It had two long brow horns, a shorter nose horn, and a big bony frill. Triceratops fossils are among the most common finds from that time, so these animals were likely plentiful.

Ankylosaurus: the living tank

Covered in bony armour plates, with a heavy club at the end of its tail. Even its eyelids had armour. Some scientists think the tail club could swing hard enough to break bone.

Parasaurolophus: the musical one

A duck-billed dinosaur with a long, hollow, backward-curving crest. Air passages inside the crest may have worked like a trombone, letting it make deep, resonant calls. Researchers have even built models to imagine what it sounded like.

And the dinosaurs still with us

Here's the coziest fact of all: dinosaurs aren't entirely gone. Birds are living dinosaurs, descended from small feathered theropods. The robin at your feeder is a very distant cousin of Tyrannosaurus.

A valley you can build

In Paper Worlds, Dino Valley lives in the Fairytale Land world: a paper landscape of ferns and distant volcanoes, where you place a brachiosaurus, a stegosaurus, and yes, a T. rex, though in this valley it's strictly decorative. Finishing the scene earns a little dinosaur nest sticker. Nothing chases anyone. It's that kind of valley.

Building a scene of your own? Our 12 sticker scene ideas include a dinosaur valley with a volcano on the horizon.