There is an even starker reminder, a greater lesson in the dinosaur extinction. What happened at the end of the Cretaceous tells us that even the most dominant animals can go extinct—and quite suddenly. Dinosaurs had been around for over 150 million years when their time of reckoning came. They had endured hardships, evolved superpowers like fast metabolisms and enormous size, and vanquished their rivals so that they ruled an entire planet. Some invented wings so they could fly beyond the bounds of the land; others literally shook the Earth as they walked. There were probably many billions of
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