From museum halls to movie screens, we love to see dinosaurs at their fiercest. All those teeth, claws, spikes, horns, and other weird adornments have provided plenty of inspiration for dramatic — and often brutal — Mesozoic scenes through the years.
But dinosaur lives were not simply “red in tooth and claw.” These once-real animals had plenty of other concerns in their daily lives — like resting, dozing, and sleeping.
Before getting into how dinosaurs said goodnight, however, it’s worth asking when dinosaurs napped.
Animals today tend to be mostly active either during the day, at night, or at dawn and dusk. And in 2011, paleontologists Lars Schmitz and Ryosuke Motani suggested that various non-avian dinosaurs were active at different times of the day, too.
Schmitz and Motani investigated the delicate eye bones of various dinosaurs to see how those structures, called scleral rings, related to when the reptiles might ...
