In the Triassic, the earliest subdivision of the Mesozoic era, two families of reptiles that had survived the Permian Extinction began to show patterns of unprecedented growth. This would continue for a hundred and fifty million years—through the Jurassic and out to the end of Cretaceous time, when the “fearfully great lizards,” on the point of disappearance, would reach their greatest size, not to be surpassed until epochs that followed the Eocene development of whales.
