From Jurassic Park terror to flyer

As I continue to read the site as mentioned in my last post, they make the point that Dr. J.H. Ostrom's work lead to modern theories of Dino to Bird Evolution. Specifically, http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/diapsids/saurischia/maniraptora.html . Now if some of you don't already know, raptors in Jurassic Park we're alot larger then their real life counterparts. Although they might still be as deadly, they certainly were not as tall. What gets me about this is that, at the earliest, I head about the Dino to Bird connection during 1997. Which, knowing me, broke the media about 5 years earlier (since I get all my info about 5 years too late >.>). Which means, we had an idea of Dino to Bird Evolution for 22 years before the general populous got wind of it.

That forces me to beg the question, how much info on dinosaurs I got via word of mouth/media vs respectable academic institutions.  The Answer: alot if not, all of it.


So now I ask, how much info do I not know because I don't have subscriptions to academic journals reserved for people with doctorates? This means that a lot of my current info is sorely misinformed, outdated, or just plain wrong.

I remember that for years I believed that the T-Rex, just as in Jurassic Park, could not see objects that we're not moving, until Wikipedia stated that there was major debate, and now it is accepted that T-Rexs could probably see the world really really well. (yeah go ahead and laugh at my attempts to learn using Wikipedia)

Point I am trying to make is, I might be the most uninformed person when it comes to paleontology.