Dinosaurs Honor

The Pathfinder Dinosaur honor gets the whole Unit leaning over the table the moment a photo of a skeleton appears. It uses that curiosity to teach you to think like a paleontologist, separating what fossils show from what is still a hypothesis.

The full requirements of the Dinosaurs honor are in the catalog under code EN-079. Here they are summarized, with no answer key, along with the content you need to study, checked on October 6, 2026, in the sources listed at the end.

🦕What is the Pathfinder Dinosaur honor?

The Dinosaurs honor has the code EN-079 and belongs to the Nature Study honors. According to the catalog, it was created in 2012 by the South American Division (SAD) of the Seventh-day Adventist Church and sits at level 1, the basic level. None of its 13 requirements calls for another honor first.

It suits Pathfinders of any age who enjoy science and works well as a Unit project, with the research split among the members.

The topic connects with the Reptiles honor: according to the Brazilian magazine Pesquisa FAPESP, dinosaurs, crocodilians and pterosaurs come from the same large group of reptiles, the archosaurs. Afterward, move on to the Fossils (EN-017) and Geology (EN-047) honors.

📋What are the Dinosaurs honor requirements?

The catalog lists 13 requirements, summarized in the table without answers; the version your Instructor uses is the one that counts. Notice that requirement 8 places plesiosaurs and pterosaurs among the “dinosaur groups,” while requirement 5 asks you to explain why they are left out. Make that difference clear.

Requirements 1, 3 and 4 cover the origin of the word and the conversation between faith and science, the subjects of the guides Dinosaurs and the Bible and Fossils and the Flood. Present each theory the way its supporters present it: the Adventist Church believes in “a recent six-day creation” (Fundamental Belief 6), and mainstream science works with ages of millions of years. The article on creation and evolution sums up the church's position.

Summary of the requirements of honor EN-079 in the Desbravai catalog. Check the full text with your Instructor.

🦴What are the main groups of dinosaurs?

In 1887, the English biologist H. G. Seeley split dinosaurs into two branches based on the shape of the pelvis: Saurischia (“lizard-hipped”) and Ornithischia (“bird-hipped”). The division is still in use, but Encyclopaedia Britannica points out that no classification is accepted by everyone and that the picture changes with new discoveries.

The saurischians include the sauropodomorphs, with small heads and long necks, almost all of them plant eaters; some of the oldest, such as Buriolestes from Rio Grande do Sul, ate meat. In the traditional division, they include the so-called prosauropods, smaller and older, and the sauropods, the giants; the exact relationship between the two is still debated. The theropods are saurischians too: they include almost all known meat-eating dinosaurs and, in today's scientific classification, birds.

Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Dinosaur entry; theropod footprints: Geoscience Research Institute (2025).

🦅Why is a pterosaur not a dinosaur?

Pterosaurs show up in children's books and in bags of toy dinosaurs, but they do not belong to the group. In 2014, at an exhibition on pterosaurs, paleontologist Mark Norell, curator of the show and chair of the Division of Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), explained that dinosaurs have features pterosaurs lack, such as a hole in the hip socket. In a pterosaur, that socket is only a depression in the bone, the Natural History Museum of Utah describes.

According to the AMNH, pterosaurs were the first vertebrates to fly, with a wing that was probably supported by a greatly elongated fourth finger. The show's co-curator was paleontologist Alexander Kellner, of Brazil's National Museum (Museu Nacional/UFRJ, part of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro), in Rio de Janeiro.

Plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs were marine reptiles. Randy Irmis, curator of paleontology at the Utah museum, notes that “marine dinosaurs” never existed: sea reptiles formed lineages separate from the dinosaurs. The first complete skeleton of Plesiosaurus, a name meaning “near to reptile,” was found in 1823 by the Englishwoman Mary Anning, reports the Natural History Museum in London.

In Brazil, the Araripe Basin, in the south of Ceará state, has pterosaur fossils and even a geosite called Pterosaur Park (Parque dos Pterossauros), in the Araripe Geopark.

🥚How were dinosaurs born, and what did dinosaur skin look like?

As far as anyone knows, all dinosaurs laid eggs, and embryos have been found inside some of them, according to Britannica. Proof that at least one kind of dinosaur built nests came from an American Museum of Natural History expedition to the Gobi Desert, in Mongolia: in July 1923, Roy Chapman Andrews's team found a nest with eggs, the European Geosciences Union (EGU) recounts.

The eggs were assigned to Protoceratops, and a dinosaur found next to the nest was named Oviraptor, “egg thief.” About 70 years later, scientists realized the eggs belonged to Oviraptor itself. In Brazil, Peirópolis, in Uberaba (Minas Gerais), gained attention in 1967 with the discovery of 3 dinosaur eggs, according to the Federal University of Triângulo Mineiro (UFTM).

Skin almost never fossilizes, but sometimes it leaves its texture pressed into rock. According to Britannica, most of these impressions show a granular surface covered in small bumps, unlike the scales of most living reptiles. Filaments and feathers appear in some dinosaurs, and their original colors cannot be known.

🇧🇷What are the best-known dinosaurs found in Brazil?

The state of Rio Grande do Sul holds some of the oldest dinosaurs in the world. In 2019, Pesquisa FAPESP magazine reported that only Brazil and Argentina have fossils this old that are accepted by consensus as dinosaurs. Staurikosaurus pricei, from the Santa Maria region, was the first dinosaur found in Brazil to be described by science, in 1970: a meat eater about 2.5 meters long.

Even there, dinosaurs are rare: “Only 5% of the fossils we find in the Santa Maria formation are from dinosaurs,” paleontologist Flávio Pretto, of the Federal University of Santa Maria (UFSM), told the magazine (our translation from Portuguese). In 2023, the region became the Quarta Colônia UNESCO Global Geopark, with rocks that science dates to 233 to 225 million years ago.

In Uberaba (Minas Gerais), the widening of the BR-050 highway uncovered hundreds of fossils of Uberabatitan ribeiroi in 2004, a titanosaur (giant sauropod) described in 2008 by researchers from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) and the National University of Comahue, in Argentina. UFTM puts its length at more than 26 meters; UNESCO, which recognized the Uberaba Geopark in 2024, at 27 meters.

Periods according to scientific dating. Sources: Pesquisa FAPESP (2019); original descriptions by Colbert (1970), Langer and colleagues (1999), Cabreira and colleagues (2016), Pacheco and colleagues (2019) and Salgado and Carvalho (2008); UNESCO and UFTM.

🏛️Which dinosaur museum in Brazil can your club visit?

One of the best-known destinations is the Peirópolis Dinosaur Museum (Museu dos Dinossauros), about 22 km from Uberaba (Minas Gerais). Opened in 1992 and part of UFTM since 2010, it has skeleton replicas, dioramas, original fossils and trained guides.

In Rio Grande do Sul, the Quarta Colônia Paleontological Research Support Center (Centro de Apoio à Pesquisa Paleontológica da Quarta Colônia, Cappa/UFSM), in São João do Polêsine, houses Gnathovorax and has kept a permanent paleontology exhibit since 2016, with guided tours, according to UFSM. In Ceará, the Plácido Cidade Nuvens Paleontology Museum, of the Regional University of Cariri (URCA), in Santana do Cariri, brings together pterosaurs, dinosaurs and fossil fish. In Rio de Janeiro, Brazil's National Museum (Museu Nacional/UFRJ) was hit by the 2018 fire; on October 6, 2026, the museum's official website was inviting visitors to free temporary exhibitions at the São Cristóvão Palace (Paço de São Cristóvão).

Check opening hours and book before taking the club: Peirópolis, Cappa and the National Museum receive groups by appointment. Ask for a guided visit and bring notes on what requirement 13 asks for each fossil.

If you find a strange bone on a trail, photograph it, mark the spot and contact a museum or university. In Brazil, under Decree-Law 4,146 of 1942 (Decreto-Lei 4.146), fossil deposits are “property of the Nation,” and removing fossils requires prior authorization from the federal mining agency, today the National Mining Agency (Agência Nacional de Mineração, ANM); museums and official institutions file a prior notice. Brazil's Constitution includes sites of paleontological value in the country's cultural heritage (article 216).

🔍What does a paleontologist do, and how do you earn the honor?

A paleontologist's work starts in the field, searching for rock with fossils and digging slowly. Fragile bones travel to the lab in a plaster jacket, and there preparators remove the rock around the fossil, the AMNH explains. Footprints, eggs and coprolites (fossilized droppings) count too: they are trace fossils, which record the animal's activity.

There are Adventist scientists in this field. The Geoscience Research Institute (GRI), founded by the Seventh-day Adventist Church in 1958 to integrate science and faith, announced in December 2025 a study by Raúl Esperante and colleagues, published in the scientific journal PLOS One, with more than 16,000 footprints, most of them from three-toed theropods, at Carreras Pampa, in Torotoro National Park, Bolivia, considered the largest dinosaur tracksite ever recorded. The GRI says it does its research from a biblical view of creation.

For requirement 12, pick a Brazilian dinosaur from the table and write in your own words, citing your sources; for requirement 13, use images from museums and note the credit for each one. Common mistakes:

• Calling a pterosaur a dinosaur. The hip separates the groups.
• Treating an illustration as fact. Skin color is an artist's choice.
• Copying a ready-made answer sheet. Ready-made material may contain errors.
• Keeping a fossil found on the trail. Contact a museum.

When you are ready, review the full requirements of the Dinosaurs honor in the catalog and schedule the evaluation with your Instructor. After that, the Fossils honor takes your study further.