Life was good for the 'terrible lizards' before that fateful asteroid hit.
But we’ve been so focused on how the Age of Dinosaurs ended that their unexpected rise is often overlooked. Around 201 million years ago, at the dawn of the Jurassic Period, a different mass extinction allowed dinosaurs to become the “terrible lizards” we so adore. Of the five mass extinctions that paleontologists recognize, it was the fourth that truly set the stage
The idea of dinosaur “dominance” is so commonplace that it’s strange to think there was a time in the distant past when the reptiles were not large and in charge. Yet that is exactly what paleontologists have discovered. The oldest dinosaurs we presently know of, from Triassic rocks dating to more than 230 million years ago, were relatively small, slender creatures who were rare compared to the other animals of the ancient landscape.
The Triassic saw different families of reptiles thrive. A mass extinction at the beginning of the period, caused byin what’s now Siberia, spurred rapid global warming, changes in atmospheric oxygen levels, and other ecological havoc that pushed the scaly creatures to evolve in new ways or go extinct. The first dinosaurs that evolved in the aftermath were slender, omnivorous creatures about the size of a labradoodle.
But by the 1950s, paleontologists noticed that many of the Triassic animal groups they had uncovered had disappeared by the earliest days of the following period, the Jurassic. The vast majority of the diverse pseudosuchians vanished, while dinosaurs seem to persist through the Triassic-Jurassic boundary almost unscathed. Experts have proposed everything from
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