Dinosaurs Gallery

Awful Changes

A cartoon, published in 1830, 28 years before Darwin's Origin Of Species, lampooning theories of evolution. Entitled Awful Changes, it depicts an Ichthyosaurus giving a lecture on a human skull, descibing how its characteristics indicate that man was of the lower order of animals'. He continues: The teeth are very insignificant, the power of the jaws trifling, and altogether it seems wonderful how the creature could have procured food'. Drawn and engraved by H.T. de la Beche (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

© 2005 Getty Images

Artwork of a spinosaurus dinosaur

Spinosaurus (meaning spine lizard') was arguably the largest known meat-eating dinosaur. It was longer even than Tyrannosaurus and Giganotosaurus at, according to one estimate, up to 18m in length. Named for the elongated spinal bones that make up the curious sail on its back, spinosaurus was probably a fish-eater. Its head was narrow like that of a crocodile and, like that animal, might have spent its life on land and in water. It lived towards the end of the Cretaceous period, in what is now northern Africa

© Science Photo Library

A long-horned European wild ox attacked by wolves

A long-horned European wild ox attacked by wolves. . The aurochs or urus (Bos primigenius), the ancestor of domestic cattle, was a type of wild cattle which inhabited Europe, Asia and North Africa. Extinct. Colour printed illustration by Heinrich Harder from Tiere der Urwelt Animals of the Prehistoric World, 1916, Hamburg. Heinrich Harder (1858-1935) was a German landscape artist and book illustrator

© Florilegius / Mary Evans