The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World: The Definitive Dinosaur Encyclopedia with Stunning Illustrations, Embark on a Prehistoric Quest!

by Steve Brusatte

Most of all, though, I want to show that dinosaurs were not aliens, nor were they failures, and they’re certainly not irrelevant. They were remarkably successful,

Their home was our home—the same Earth, subject to the same whims of climate and environmental change that we have to deal with, or perhaps will deal with in the future. They evolved in concert with an ever changing world, one subject to monstrous volcanic eruptions and asteroid impacts, and one in which the continents were moving around, sea levels were constantly fluctuating, and temperatures were capriciously rising and falling. They became supremely well adapted to their environments, but in the end, most of them went extinct when they couldn’t cope with a sudden crisis. No doubt there is a lesson there for us.

Descriptions of the doom and gloom could go on for pages, but the point is, the end of the Permian was a very bad time to be alive. It was the biggest episode of mass death in the history of our planet. Somewhere around 90 percent of all species disappeared.