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Name: The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs
Rating: 4.6 (74 reviews)
Author: Steve Brusatte

Steve Brusatte

A New History of a Lost World

4.6 (74 ratings)

28 mins

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The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs
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What’s in it for me? Get to grips with a topic you wish you knew more about.

Dinosaurs have long captivated our imagination. Just think of successful film franchises like Jurassic Park, and who can forget the T. Rex fight in Peter Jackson’s King Kong?

But that’s the stuff of fantasy. How much do you really know about dinosaurs? That’s where Steve Brusatte can help. Humans have been around for a just a fraction of the time dinosaurs existed – which makes you realize just how quickly it could all vanish, as it did for the dinosaurs.

For almost 200 million years, dinosaurs roamed and ruled the Earth, long before humans could even be considered a species. Then, 66 million years ago, they were completely wiped out. We’ve only been able to piece together – sometimes quite literally! – facts about them and their environment over the last few centuries.

Now, thanks to fascinating new research and discoveries, we’re closer than ever to knowing about the history of the dinosaurs – even though some pieces of the puzzle are still missing.

Let these blinks take you on a journey, traveling to the land before humankind: the land of dinosaurs!

In these blinks, you’ll learn

what Disney films Fantasia and Pinocchio have to do with a T. Rex;
where half of all recent dinosaur fossil discoveries have occurred; and
why Transylvania was the home of dwarf dinosaurs.

There was life on Earth before the dinosaurs, and it took a cataclysmic event for them to become dominant.

In the popular imagination, the dinosaurs' rule over the Earth lasted from the first stirrings of life on the planet right up until their extinction.

But, of course, dinosaurs weren’t the first inhabitants of Earth.

It was around 390 million years ago that life first crawled onto land. From then until the end of the Permian Period, around 252 million years ago, the animal kingdom comprised a range of strange reptilian and mammalian creatures.

The Permian Period, however, ended with the largest mass extinction event in Earth’s history.

It began when volcanoes started exuding vast amounts of magma. It continued to flow for several hundred thousand years, perhaps even a few million. There’s evidence of the scale of the disaster from geological records; when looking at formations from this period, the rock type changes dramatically and fossils simply stop appearing.

It was devastating: around 90 percent of all species had died out by the time the crisis ended and ushered in the Triassic Period.

However, not all life vanished. Tracks from early archosaurs – the early reptilian ancestors of dinosaurs – have survived from around 250 million years ago.

These archosaurs thrived in this new world, and soon divided into two groups. There were the ancestors of our modern crocodiles, the pseudosuchians – their name means "false crocodiles” – and the avemetatarsalians.

It was these avemetatarsalians that evolved into dinosaurs, who then split into three groups. There were the meat-eating theropods, the plant-eating ornithischians and the long-necked sauropods.

These groups didn’t just evolve and survive – they thrived.

For instance, 230 million years ago, in what is now Argentina’s Ischigualasto Provincial Park, numerous species established themselves. We know this because of the phenomenal quantity of fossils that have been found there over the course of the twentieth century. The hot and humid climate there, which led to occasional flooding, was ideal for preserving fossils.

So, it had taken a near apocalypse to for the dinosaur age to begin, but the Triassic Age had now truly dawned. It was to be a fascinating and diverse evolutionary journey – yet there was still quite a long way to go.

Dinosaurs weren't immediately dominant, but soon took advantage of ecological conditions to establish themselves.

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.

The dinosaurs survived another mass extinction event, diversifying to become some of the biggest animals ever.

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.

Thanks to geological processes and mercenary fossil hunters, we know an awful lot about the Jurassic Period.

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.

The T. Rex is deservedly fearsome and famous, but the rest of large tyrannosaur family were just as impressive.

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.

Thanks to fossil records we know more about T. Rex than many living animals, and it deserves its monstrous reputation.

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 may have ruled North America, but that wasn’t the dinosaurs’ only evolutionary success story.

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?

Birds didn't simply evolve from dinosaurs, they are dinosaurs – and their main characteristics are Jurassic relics.

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.

A catastrophic impact from space killed the dinosaurs, but some paleontologists claim that dinosaurs were already on the way out.

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.

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What is The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs about?

In The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs (2018), leading young paleontologist Steve Brusatte takes us on a journey through time and space, detailing the history of the different dinosaurs and the worlds in which they lived. He is guided by his deep knowledge of fossils and geological evidence, and is thus able to bring the fascinating stories of dinosaurs into clear focus.

Best quote from The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs

Imagine Pangea as a giant pizza, being torn apart by two hungry friends at opposite ends of the table.

—Steve Brusatte

Who should read The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs?

Anyone looking to take their knowledge of dinosaurs beyond Jurassic Park
Adults who loved playing with dinosaurs when they were kids
People interested in geology and fossils

About the Author

Steve Brusatte is an American paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh. He has written for Scientific American and has been a consultant for the BBC’s Walking with Dinosaurs. He has also worked with major figures in paleontology, and his groundbreaking discoveries have established him as a world expert in the field.

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Science Nature & the Environment

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