The Dinosaur 37% Of People Wish They Could See Alive And In Person

If you've seen any of the Jurassic Park movies, you know that the moral of the story is, again and again, people and dinosaurs really shouldn't interact. Nevertheless, it's fun to ignore all of the inevitable chasing, crushing, gouging, and devouring and consider, given the opportunity, which dinosaur you'd most like to see alive and in person. Grunge took a poll of 518 people around the United States asking this very question. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the most popular answer was the iconic "tyrant king," Tyrannosaurus rex, who brought in a full 36.87 percent of the votes.

Per National Geographic (and confirmed by dinosaur-happy kindergartners generation after generation), Tyrannosarus rex "was one of the most ferocious predators to ever walk the Earth." Weighing in at a whopping 5.5 to 8 tons and measuring 40 feet long and 12 feet tall, T-rex loved eating meat so much that they'd go after both living prey and carcasses, and would even eat each other when particularly hungry. Their heads were reportedly "the stuff of nightmares," built for massive crunching with up to six tons of pressure able to come through in one bite. This all sounds completely terrifying and like nothing many of us would want to see in person, but perhaps these attributes are exactly why a majority of poll respondents want to see T-rex more than any other dinosaur.  

Coming in at second place in the poll was Triceratops, which got 19.88 percent of the vote. Triceratops is another instantly recognizable dinosaur. It ate an exclusively vegetarian diet and was about the size of an African elephant, per Live Science, with a signature three-horned face that gave it its name. Great Britain's Natural History Museum pointed out that the Triceratops' horns and bony neck frill served as defense against the aforementioned Tyranosaurus rex. In 1997, paleontologists found a partial Triceratops fossil in which the horn was bitten off, with the teeth marks matching those of a T-rex. The horn showed signs of healing, suggesting that some Triceratops came out of such encounters and lived to see another day.

Stegosaurus took third place in the poll, with 15.64 percent of the vote. Velociraptor took fourth place, with 11.78 percent of the vote; perhaps the fear one would think people would feel for the Tyranosaurus rex was saved for Velociraptors, known for their intelligence and terrifying hunting skills, thanks to the original Jurassic Park. Ankylosaurus was the fifth most popular individual selection, taking 6.56 percent of the vote, and the remaining 9.27 percent was shared by the Other category. An especially popular write-in was the Brontosaurus, which at one point was thought to have not existed at all, actually falling under the Apatosaurus genus. However, per Scientific American, 2015 research proved this to be wrong and brought the Brontosaurus back from a second extinction.