The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs summary

Two hundred and thirty million years ago, Earth bore little resemblance to the planet we know now. There were no continents, just a single landmass now known as Pangea. It was also very hot; the poles weren’t frozen and were as temperate as London or San Francisco today. On top of all of that, so-called “megamonsoons” plagued Pangea, effectively dividing it into different environmental regions.

Each of these new environmental provinces existed essentially as a blank slate. The Permian extinction meant that they became fertile breeding grounds for all sorts of creatures. Nature started experimenting and, soon enough, huge numbers of various mammals, amphibians and reptiles could call Earth home.

Around 240 million years ago, Pangea started to break apart. Ultimately, from this gradual dissolution, the continents we inhabit today were formed in a slow and barely perceptible process. But then, around 201 million years ago, the Triassic Period came to a violent close.

As Pangea broke apart, magma began pooling just beneath the Earth’s crust and eventually burst through. But it was no normal volcanic eruption. Tsunamis of lava obliterated about 3 million square miles of central Pangea. Overall, around 30 percent of all existing species were killed. And it was no one-off event, either; in total, four lava surges, each up to 3,000 feet deep, passed over the Earth.

The Late Jurassic Period, about 150 million years ago, was teeming with dinosaurs. We know this because of the vast fossil record that has been preserved – but why is this the case?

For starters, many different types of dinosaurs lived close to water. This is critical because rivers, lakes and seas are ideal locations for fossil preservation. Layers of sediment build up and become rock, forming and protecting fossils in the process. And it’s there where these fossils sit, waiting to be discovered.

If you’ve heard of one dinosaur, then it has to be the Tyrannosaurus Rex. But did you know that T. Rex was actually just one member of a whole family of tyrannosaurs?

Thanks to discoveries in the last 15 years, new light has been shed on this fascinating family. In total, 20 new types of tyrannosaur have been unearthed all over the world, from the Gobi Desert to the Arctic Circle.

If there’s one dinosaur that remains more famous today than any other, it’s the dreaded Tyrannosaurus Rex – literally meaning the tyrant lizard king!

How did it get to such a position of ignominy?

T. Rex had North America as its stomping ground, but there was no way it could have dominated the rest of the world. After all, by the end of the Cretaceous period, around 84 to 66 million years ago, the continents were about as split and separate as they are today. What’s more, because of continental drift, ecosystems had diversified and changed.

This begs the question: What other dinosaurs were there on other continents?

It’s a common myth that birds evolved from dinosaurs. But that’s not quite right.

Birds did initially evolve from dinosaurs, but they then evolved alongside them. It’s best to think of birds as a subgroup of dinosaurs, much as sauropods or tyrannosaurs were.

Sixty-six million years ago, an asteroid or comet – scientists are unsure which – about the size of Mount Everest smashed into Earth. It hit with a force equivalent to a billion nuclear bombs, and set off a global chain reaction. By the time it was over, 70 percent of all species on Earth were extinct, the dinosaurs among them.

The geological evidence is clear enough: there has never been any doubt that a cataclysmic extinction occurred. For instance, in a gorge outside of Gubbio, Italy, a thin layer of clay separates the fossil-rich Cretaceous Period limestone from the barren limestone of the Paleogene Period.