10 Unbelievable Dinos That Really Existed

Dome-Headed Dinos

Dinosaurs by their nature seem bizarre, larger than life -- mysterious. And the history of dinos is constantly rewritten. Here we present to you 10 dinos that are furrier, freakier and more colorful than we previously thought possible.

Dome-Headed Dinos

Head-butting pachycephalosaurs, with noggins shaped like built-in football helmets, have long puzzled paleontologists.

"The head-slapping behavior of crocodiles and the face-pecking observed in a variety of birds suggest that 'using your head' is not unique to pachycephalosaurs," says Joseph Peterson, a geology professor at the University of Wisconsin. "Domes likely evolved in response to such behavior."

Four-Winged Dino

Scientists now think that some dinos that flew didn't have two wings. They had four.

"The first birds descended from four-winged dinosaurs," says renowned dinosaur and early avian hunter Xing Xu, a professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. One such dinosaur might have been Microraptor, a non-avian dino that had feathers on both its arms and legs.

Dinochicken

OK, full disclosure: This dino doesn't exist yet. But even conceptually it's bizarre enough to be included in this list. It's a dino -- and it's a chicken. It's a Dinochicken.

Paleontologist Jack Horner and his colleagues have been genetically engineering chickens to reactivate ancestral traits, such as long tails, which are more associated with non-avian dinosaurs.

"Birds are dinosaurs," Horner told Discovery News. "So technically we're making a dinosaur out of a dinosaur."

Read more at Discovery News