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1-Page Summary of The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs
Overview
Dinosaurs have long fascinated people. They’re the inspiration for many films and they’ve been featured in pop culture. However, most of what we know about dinosaurs is based on fantasy rather than science. So, wouldn’t it be helpful to understand how scientists are piecing together a picture of the past? That’s where Steve Brusatte comes in because he can help us learn about dinosaurs as well as his own insights into them.
Dinosaurs have existed for almost 200 million years. They survived before humans, but were wiped out 66 million years ago. Scientists have only been able to figure out how they lived and what their environment was like recently.
Now, thanks to new research and discoveries, we are closer than ever to knowing about the history of dinosaurs. Scientists have been able to piece together an accurate timeline for when they lived on Earth. However, there are still some missing pieces in that puzzle.
Let’s take a trip to the land before humankind: the land of dinosaurs! We’ll learn about what Disney films Fantasia and Pinocchio have in common with a T. Rex, where half of all recent dinosaur fossil discoveries have occurred, and why Transylvania was home to dwarf dinosaurs.
Big Idea #1: There was life on Earth before the dinosaurs, and it took a cataclysmic event for them to become dominant.
The popular view is that dinosaurs ruled the Earth for hundreds of millions of years and then disappeared.
But, of course, dinosaurs weren’t the first inhabitants on Earth. It was around 390 million years ago that life first crawled onto land. From then until the end of the Permian Period, a lot of strange animals existed. The Permian Period ended with one of Earth’s biggest extinction events and it began when volcanoes started exuding vast amounts of magma for several hundred thousand years or even millions. There is evidence from geological records; there is a change in rock type and fossils stop appearing during this time period.
The Permian extinction was a devastating time in Earth’s history. Nearly every species on the planet died out, except for early reptiles that would eventually evolve into dinosaurs. However, there are no dinosaur tracks from this period because they did not yet exist.
Dinosaurs were able to survive in the new world. Soon, they divided into two groups: pseudosuchians and avemetatarsalians. The latter evolved into dinosaurs, who then split further into three groups: meat-eating theropods, plant-eating ornithischians and long-necked sauropods.
These groups did not only evolve and survive, they thrived.
For example, 230 million years ago in Argentina’s Ischigualasto Provincial Park, numerous species thrived. This is because of the hot and humid climate that led to occasional flooding. That climate was ideal for preserving fossils.
So, it took a near apocalypse for the dinosaur age to begin. The Triassic Age began and was very diverse.
Big Idea #2: Dinosaurs weren’t immediately dominant, but soon took advantage of ecological conditions to establish themselves.
Earth was different 200 million years ago. There were no continents, just one landmass that we now call Pangea. It was also very hot; the poles weren’t frozen and were as temperate as London or San Francisco today. Also, there were megamonsoons that divided Earth into different environments.
When the Permian extinction happened, new environmental provinces were formed. These new provinces allowed for many different creatures to evolve and thrive in them. Nature started experimenting with all sorts of mammals, reptiles, amphibians and dinosaurs in these areas. The dinosaurs didn’t dominate as much in some places because they had a lot of competition from other creatures.
