Dinosaurs Didn't Read - Look What Happened To Them

A fossil T. rex skull with a red book clamped in its jaws, framed by the line Dinosaurs Didn't Read – Look What Happened To Them. The joke is the fake causal link – a hundred and sixty million years of dominance and not one library, so obviously the asteroid was a secondary factor.

It is a tongue-in-cheek reading slogan, popular on classroom and library walls, whose exact origin is not documented. Taken literally it is a textbook false-cause fallacy. Taken as intended it says that knowledge is how a species sees trouble coming – and that it is still worth opening a book.

Most scientists point to the asteroid, roughly 10 to 15 km wide, that struck what is now the Yucatán Peninsula about 66 million years ago, leaving the 180 km Chicxulub crater. Luis and Walter Alvarez and colleagues proposed the impact in 1980 from an iridium layer. About three quarters of all species died out; massive Deccan Traps volcanism is debated as a contributing factor.

Yes. Birds evolved from small feathered theropods, the same group as T. rex and Velociraptor, and are the only dinosaur lineage known to have survived the extinction 66 million years ago. So strictly speaking only the non-avian dinosaurs died out – the pigeon outside your window is a living dinosaur.

The first dinosaurs appeared in the Triassic, at least 230 million years ago, and the non-avian dinosaurs vanished 66 million years ago – a run of roughly 165 million years. Homo sapiens, by comparison, has existed for about 300,000 years, which is one more argument for reading up on how not to go extinct.

In the Discourse on Method (1637), Part 1, Descartes writes that reading all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries who wrote them. The line is often quoted alone, but he goes on to say he left book learning to study the great book of the world – read widely, then think for yourself.

In his second Letter to Lucilius, Seneca warns against skimming many books – nowhere is he who is everywhere. He advises dwelling on a few master thinkers, digesting them and taking one idea away each day. A good counterweight to the slogan – it is not how much you read, but how well.

Regular reading builds vocabulary, background knowledge and the ability to follow long arguments, and studies link reading fiction with better understanding of other people's perspectives, though effect sizes vary. Philosophers would add the oldest benefit – reading lets you argue with minds you could never meet.

Yes, it is one of our favourites for English and history teachers, librarians, booksellers, palaeontology fans and parents of young readers – funny enough for the staff room, harmless enough for the classroom. It comes as a T-shirt, women's T-shirt, sweatshirt, premium hoodie, mug and sticker.