I don't know if you'd also like recs for books ABOUT dinosaurs but in case you do I absolutely have to put in a rec for The First Fossil Hunters by Adrienne Mayor, which is a book about how people in Greece and Rome saw all these bones lying around and interpreted them as the skeletons of mythic heroes -- I mean, you see a giant femur, you figure it belongs to a giant person, right? -- who are all taller than regular people, by the way, and there's a chart of how tall they thought all the heroes were as measured by the size of the bones they found. It's pretty cool. I also recommend the relatively recent TV series Prehistoric Road Trip which I think is still streaming on PBS. It has a lot of prehistoric life!

My rec for "historical fiction featuring romance and/or war" is probably going to be anything by Mary Renault, assuming Ancient Greece is your brand of historical. She was very, very, very good at Ancient Greece; her most famous work is probably the Alexander trilogy (Fire From Heaven, The Persian Boy, Funeral Games). Also, hey, she was gay and Alexander was... probably also pretty gay!