Smithsonian Magazine has a story about the appreciation for the average dinosaur – a duckbilled dinosaur like Edmontosaurus.  To truly understand the dinosaurs, one needs to look past the flashy and embrace the average as that is where the true clues to what life was like back in the Mesozoic.

Out of all these impressive dinosaur species, however, what was average-sized for a dinosaur? Drawing from a data set of 584 dinosaurs, Campione notes, most non-avian dinosaurs had a mass of about 7,700 pounds. That’s a pretty big animal, somewhere between modern-day rhinos and elephants. But that wasn’t uncommon in the Mesozoic. Most non-avian dinosaurs were about this size, Campione notes, exemplified by duckbilled dinosaurs that were common through the Late Cretaceous.

A duckbilled hadrosaur like Edmontosaurus is a perfectly average-sized beast; most dinosaurs were about this size, with the absolute biggest and smallest being relatively rare. And that’s significant for outlining how different the Mesozoic was from our present time.

We live in a megafaunal lull, when large animals are scarce. To know that the average dinosaur was roughly elephant-sized indicates that plant life must have been incredibly productive to support such creatures, and perhaps that dinosaurs were better protected from predators when they reached a certain size. Studies of dinosaur growth have indicated that hadrosaurs rapidly packed on the pounds as a defense against carnivores, so an adult hadrosaur represents the size threshold when potential lunch became too much of a bother.

But average has another, less quantitative meaning, too. Many famous dinosaurs were festooned with horns, had impressive teeth or otherwise stand out because they look odd. Dinosaurs likely evolved these traits to impress each other, and so we, in turn, are impressed. With this in mind, what dinosaurs were just plain boring? Ornithopods

This group of herbivorous dinosaurs includes some favorites such as the crested hadrosaur Parasaurolophus, but also small, beaked plant-eaters like Dryosaurus. What unites these dinosaurs is that they all have three-toed feet, were capable of walking on two legs, and had both beaks and teeth to help them process lots of plant food, with the smallest being about five feet long and the largest stretching to 50 feet long. Often, they’re cast as the prey for the charismatic, toothy predators of their times. “These dinosaurs definitely get made fun of for being boring or, in the case of Dryosaurus, being dry,” says Central Michigan University paleontologist Karen Poole. Most of the time, these dinosaurs are shunted off to the side in museum halls while the more ornate and scary dinosaurs take center stage.