Dinosaurs?

[Nilore]

Did Dinosaurs ever live in Tolkiens Worlds?

Nilore

[Ñólendil]

What do you mean by "Worlds"? In the legendarium the Lord of the Rings belongs to, I think the answer is "yes". For one thing, at the time of the Lord of the Rings, Tolkien had a world in mine that was "scientifically" (if that is the right word) more akin to our own (the Earth rotates around the Sun, and all that). For another thing, in one of the Letters, and I cannot find the book at the moment, a reader asks if the winged beasts of the Nazgûl are supposed to be pterodactyls. Tolkien answered "yes and no", explaining that the beasts aren' supposed to be any sort of equivalent or symbol or representative of pterodactyls, but that they certainly were supposed to be the unlikely survivors of a time in which such beasts roamed the world as can be read about in our myths of dinosaurs -- not that dinosaurs did not exist, but we have definitely embellished the life of dinosaurs. In other words, taking on a Secondary Belief of Tolkien's world, the winged beasts were the real pterodactyls.

But even the primitive mythology of the published Silmarillion, I think there is evidence of dinosaurs:

Now Melkor began the delving and building of a vast fortress, deep under Earth, beneath dark mountains where the beams of Illuin were cold and dim. That stronghold was named Utumno. And though the Valar knew naught of it as yet, nonetheless the evil of Melkor and the blight of his hatred flowed out thence, and the Spring of Arda was marred. Green things fell sick and roted, and rivers were choked with weeds and slime, and fens were made, rank and poisonous, the breeding place of flies; and forests grew dark and perilous, the haunts of fear; and beasts became monsters of horn and ivory and dyed the earth with blood. ...


-- Of the Beginning of Days