Ancient Web: Berkeley’s Dinosaur Page Explained Why Birds Are Still Dinosaurs

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

UC Berkeley's Museum of Paleontology made a dinosaur homepage with a rather important warning: not everything big, prehistoric, and frightening was actually a dinosaur.

Visit the original Dinosauria exhibit.

The page opens with a Diplodocus carnegii family illustration credited to Michael Skrepnick in 1998 and a running Deinonychus drawing credited to B. Cunningham in 1995. Those dates belong to the artwork, not necessarily the publication date of the whole webpage. The illustrations surround a plain-language explanation of Dinosauria and a set of questions about what the animals were.

The exhibit introduces Richard Owen's 1842 name for the group, explains its Mesozoic history, and immediately complicates the popular story that all dinosaurs died out. Birds are living dinosaurs. Even a hummingbird, it insists, is one of them.

The movie version needs correcting

The page is fond of distinguishing neighboring branches on the evolutionary tree. Pterosaurs are relatives but are not dinosaurs. Neither are plesiosaurs, ichthyosaurs, mammoths, or Dimetrodon. Its example about Stegosaurus and Tyrannosaurus makes another point: animals familiar from a movie poster did not necessarily inhabit the same period.

Its frequently asked questions lead to short essays about bird ancestry, extinction, warm-bloodedness, running speed, and the portrayal of dinosaurs in film. A linked Dilophosaurus feature invites readers to hear about the animal from discoverer Sam Welles, while a separate T. rex exhibit has its own collection of facts and images.

This was a museum working as a set of interlinked teaching rooms. Visitors were expected to leave the front page and read a sequence of topics, not wait for an automatically selected video.

Some dates and species counts in older educational pages need updating as scientific research advances. The site itself cites books from 1985, 1995, and 2004, exposing the sources that shaped the version currently online.

The attraction is not a claim that this page was the first dinosaur resource on the Web. It is the survival of a coherent, illustrated university lesson from an era when science outreach was often assembled from individual HTML documents.

Browse the dinosaur questions and exhibits.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.