After a certain age people stop asking you what your favorite dinosaur is, and I think that's sad.
My current one's the Anchiornis, because it's in the same clade as birds so it's in their family tree, and it really looks like a prototype of a bird. It had 4 wings for example, but it already looked very birb-y:
(Figured I'd just turn an earlier comment into an actual post because why not)
Movie depictions of Triceratops rub me the wrong way. Never liked Sarah in Land Before Time and my daughter loves Ice Age Buck Wild and the triceratops is the bad guy in that, too. They do triceratops dirty.
My favorite cartoon as a kid had a triceratops at a hero. I don’t remember much about it and can’t find it listed online but it might have been from 1970s and I really just remember the triceratops charging at the bad guys, shooting lasers out of his horns
I used to think liking triceratops is dumb when there's likes of centrosaurus and styracosaurus, but over the years I've come to appreciate the classic design.
Patagotitan mayorum. I think that it's the largest that we know about - around 40m large. Herbivore, I can't help but think on it as a dino-giraffe: eating leaves, nesting its eggs, not giving too much of a fuck about the small critters nearby.
I love this question! This made me really happy. My favorite has always been (and remains) the brontosaurus. (Probably can blame "The Land Before Time" for its influence.)
I remember in the early/mid-90s being corrected that brontosaurus wasn't a dinosaur species, but was actually the same as apatosaurus. Being a stubborn child, I refused to accept this and always considered the brontosaurus, not the apatosaurus, my favorite. I felt so vindicated when the study came out in 2015 that brontosaurus and apatosaurus weren't the same.
Perhaps that's why I still stubbornly refuse to let go of Pluto: the minute hope that my favorite planet will be recognized again someday. Alas.
I had a plastic brontosaurus toy as a kid that I loved. It had a weird chemical smell to it. 30+ years later, when I hear "brontosaurus" I instantly and vividly swear I can smell it
At the risk of sounding like a basic bitch, I'm going to go with T-Rex. Sure he has ridiculously silly arms, but he gets a pass because he could bite through a car. It's a prime case of be careful who you pick on in school.
Nah, it's the first one because that's exactly where we decided to draw the line. Birds have to start somewhere, so why not with archaeopteryx? So it will never change no matter what other species we find.
If we are accepting non-dinosaur but ancient creatures, my favorite is the anomalocaris :) it's just a goofy lil guy with a mouth snoot. Plus, they never say no to a snack. (They're at the end.)
Oviraptor was originally found together with a big nest of ceratopsian eggs, so it was assumed they fed by stealing those. Years later it was discovered the eggs actually belonged to the oviraptor who was protecting them till death.
Stenonychosaurus (née Troodon) because as unlikely and silly an idea as it was I always found the whole "how intelligent could they have become if they hadn't gone extinct" thought experiment fascinating.
I also have a soft spot for Struthiomimus just because it's such a fun word to say.
Right? And what's really wild is that birds are literally dinosaurs. Not just descended from dinosaurs, but classified as feathered theropods and the only known living dinosaurs
Argentinosaurus. Biggest Tree Star eater ever. I think it would be the coolest thing ever to like, mount a dwelling on its back, live on and take care of it.
Crazily enough Anchiornis are dinosaurs, specifically paravian or possibly avialan depending on whose classification you believe, but dinos in any case