I like dinosaurs. I've been collecting dinosaur-related items for the past twenty-five years and I'm interested to see what my fellow FunTrivians know about these amazing animals that once ruled our planet. Even if you don't know anything at all, please feel free to join in the conversation, as you might learn something interesting. Got a dinosaur-related question? Post it here and I'll do my best to answer it for you.

Are there any cheap dinosaur fossils*? I used to like dinosaurs when I was younger. More recently, I've been looking at the shells, minerals, and couple of small fossils that survived the years and am thinking of buying a few for that reason.

*I don't really care for coprolite because I have enough crap as it is.

If you look on ebay, you'll find a range of fossils from Trilobites to dinosaur teeth, though it's hard to tell if these fossils are actually real. If you want genuine fossils, the best places to get them from are either museums (though they can be expensive)or straight out of the ground. I once went with a fossil-hunting group to a place in Victoria, Australia, called Comet Creek. I found some very interesting fossils including worm burrows and the imprints of sea shells. The rest of my fossils come from my local museum. I have fragments of dinosaur bone and eggshell, a fish, Mosasaur teeth, a Trilobite, an Ammonite and some shark teeth, including the broken tooth of a Megalodon.

I'm from Alberta, where the dinosaur memorabilia is rather thick on the ground. If you ever get up this way, a visit to Dinosaur Provincial Park is worth your time, as is a visit to the Tyrell Museum in Drumheller. Drumheller - the town is like a dino theme park.

Living in Australia, there's only one museum that's close enough for me to visit, but it has a relatively good exhibition called 'Dinosaur Walk'. Basically, it's set out in a big room with a path through the middle which is surrounded by mounted dinosaur skeleton. To one side, about halfway down the path, is an Apatosaurus thigh bone that visitors can touch. I hope one day that I can visit America and go on a tour of some of the big museums. In particular, I'd like to visit the Field Museum in Chicago where "Sue" is on display.

Sue is certainly impressive because of her size, but the absolute best dinosaur exhibit in this country (and I've been to all the large ones) is at the Museum of Natural History in NYC; it's well-done and very comprehensive. Outside the U.S., London's Natural History Museum has a wonderful dinosaur gallery--with animatronic dinosaurs, too! I haven't yet been to dinosaur country in Alberta, but that might be a plan for the next year or so.

Ever wondered how palaeontologists figure out how old a dinosaur was when it died. The answer is growth rings. If you look inside a tree trunk, there are growth rings. Each ring equals one year of growth. It's the same with dinosaurs. They have growth rings inside their bones. By counting the number of rings, palaeontologists have determined that Sue died around the age of 28, which was probably quite old for a T-Rex (though we still don't know for certain how she died or how long an individual dinosaur's lifespan was).