cololite: Term for fossilized contents of an animal’s digestive tract.
coprolite: Fossilized feces. The word coprolite, in Greek, means “dung stones.” Coprolites are very important because they can provide direct evidence of what ancient creatures ate.
crustaceans: Hard-shelled water-dwelling animals including lobsters, crabs and shrimp.
diet: (n.) The foods and liquids ingested by an animal to provide the nutrition it needs to grow and maintain health. Sometimes this is a specific food-intake plan.
dinosaur: A term that means terrible lizard. These reptiles emerged around 243 million years ago. All descended from egg-laying reptiles known as archosaurs. Their descendants eventually split into two lines. For many decades, they have been distinguished by their hips. The lizard-hipped line are believed to have led to the saurischians, such as two-footed theropods like T. rex and the lumbering four-footed Apatosaurus. A second line of so-called bird-hipped, or ornithischian dinosaurs, appears to have led to a widely differing group of animals that included the stegosaurs and duckbilled dinosaurs. Many large dinosaurs died out around 66 million years ago. But some saurischians lived on. They are now the birds we see today (and who have now evolved that so-called “bird-hipped” pelvis).
dung: The feces of animals, also known as manure.
environment: The sum of all of the things that exist around some organism or the process and the condition those things create. Environment may refer to the weather and ecosystem in which some animal lives, or, perhaps, the temperature and humidity (or even the placement of things in the vicinity of an item of interest).
extinct: (n. extinction) An adjective that describes a species for which there are no living members.
fossil: Any preserved remains or traces of ancient life. There are many different types of fossils: The bones and other body parts of dinosaurs are called “body fossils.” Things like footprints are called “trace fossils.” Even specimens of dinosaur poop are fossils. The process of forming fossils is called fossilization.
ichnologist: A scientist who studies trace fossils such as footprints, burrows or chew marks on bones.
mollusks: Soft-bodied invertebrate animals that usually live in water and develop a hard protective shell. Examples include snails, shellfish (like clams and oysters), slugs, octopuses and squids.
predator: (adjective: predatory) A creature that preys on other animals for most or all of its food.
prey: (n.) An organism hunted by another, often for food. (v.) To attack and eat another organism.
pterosaur: Any of various extinct flying reptiles of the order Pterosauria. These animals lived 245 million years ago to 65 million years ago. Although not true dinosaurs, they lived during the reign of dinosaurs. Among members of this order were the pterodactyls of the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, which were characterized by wings consisting of a flap of skin supported by the very long fourth digit on each forelimb.
regurgitalite: The scientific term for fossilized vomit.
relic: Something that is a leftover from an earlier time. The term is usually applied to things that had been fashioned by people.
reptile: Vertebrate animals belonging to a group known as Reptilia. Most reptiles have skin that is covered with scales or horny plates. Snakes, turtles, lizards and alligators are all reptiles. Once considered their own separate group, birds now belong to this order. With the exception of modern birds, most modern reptiles are cold-blooded (or ectothermic).
shell: The normally hard, protective outer covering of something. It could cover a mollusk or crustacean (such as a mussel or crab), a bird’s egg or some other relatively soft tissue that needs protection (such as a tree nut or peanut).
trace fossil: Evidence other than a preserved carcass or bones of ancient life. Footprints, burrows or chew marks on a bone are examples of such trace fossils. These can provide information that’s more valuable than body fossils. For instance, trace fossils can hint at a creature’s behavior. Evidence of that is usually scant.
woolly mammoth: A type of extinct mammal that resembled a hairy elephant.
