The dinosaurs I first met were terrors that thrived in a warm, swampy world. Books and films presented them as little more than gaudy lizards and crocodiles that had ballooned to immense sizes thanks to glandular imbalances – actually proposed as a reason for dinosaur evolution and extinction – who frittered away their days wallowing in Mesozoic muck. The fact that the books in my local libraries were out of date kept this imagery alive far past its sell-by date, well into the late 80s, but every restoration or movie I had ever seen was clear that dinosaurs inhabited a warmer world where the only two seasons were wet and dry. Even dinosaurs that ventured close to the cooler poles