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

the latest Cretaceous—this world of such geographical and ecological complexity, with different ecosystems stranded on different continents—was the heyday of the dinosaurs. It was their time of greatest diversity, the apogee of their success.

Troodon and the freakish oviraptorosaurs—picking

Oviraptorid slander

Carnotaurus had arms barely bigger than a kitchen spatula, which flopped around in a useless way, probably all but invisible if you were watching it go about its everyday business. Clearly the abelisaurids didn’t need their arms, relying on their jaws and their teeth for all of the dirty work.

That is outdated

Carcharodontosaurs and abelisaurids instead of tyrannosaurs, sauropods instead of ceratopsians, swarms of crocs instead of raptors, oviraptorosaurs, and other small theropods. The north and the south were different from each other during those waning years of the Cretaceous,

Nopcsa fell for a young man from a sheepherding village in the high mountains. This man—Bajazid Elmaz Doda—nominally became Nopcsa’s secretary, but he was so much more, although it wasn’t spoken about so openly in those less accepting times. The two lovers would remain together for nearly three decades,

Awww we love gay history!

There was only one suitable explanation: these Transylvanian dinosaurs were miniatures.

Island miniature-ism goes crazy

Underneath these rocks were other layers that came from the ocean—fine clays and shales bursting with microscopic plankton fossils. Tracing out the aerial extent of the river rocks and scrutinizing the contacts between the river and ocean layers, Nopcsa realized that his estate used to be part of an island,

HAHAHAH I ACTUALLY GOT IT

Islands are remote, so it is always a little bit random as to which species can make their way out to them, being carried by the wind or rafting in on floating logs. There is less space on islands, so fewer resources, so some species may not be able to get so big. And, because islands are severed from the mainland, their plants and animals can evolve in splendid isolation, their DNA cut off from that of their continental cousins, each inbred island-living generation becoming more different, more peculiar over time.

which they used to slash and gut their prey—but

Also outdated info now, wow it is surprising how fast this happens

The Romanian raptor was stockier than Velociraptor, many of the bones of its arms and legs were fused together, and it had even withered its hand into a conjoined mass of stubby fingers and wristbones. It was a new breed of meat-eating dinosaur, and a few months later we gave it a fitting scientific name: Balaur bondoc; the first word is an archaic Romanian term for dragon and the second means “stocky.” Balaur bondoc was the top dog of the Late Cretaceous European islands. Less tyrant than assassin, Balaur would employ its arsenal of claws to subdue the cow-size sauropods and mini-duckbills and armored dinosaurs marooned in the middle of the rising Atlantic.

horned dinosaur Protoceratops,

Protoceratops did not have horns.

The tiny Yi qi—maybe the wackiest dinosaur ever found—had a wing, but not made of feathers. Instead, it had a membrane of skin stretching between its fingers and body, like a bat. This membrane must have been a flight structure, but it was not flexible enough to actively flap, so gliding is really the only possibility.

One of my favorite dinosaurs!

Most likely, evolution had already assembled a small, winged, flapping, bona fide bird sometime in the middle part of the Jurassic Period, around 170 to 160 million years ago. That means there was a good hundred million years during which birds coexisted with their dinosaur predecessors.

A comet or an asteroid—we aren’t sure which—collided with the Earth, hitting what is now the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico. It was about six miles (ten kilometers) wide, or about the size of Mount Everest. It was probably moving at a speed of around 67,000 miles per hour (108,000 kilometers per hour),

It plowed some twenty-five miles (forty kilometers) through the crust and into the mantle, leaving a crater that was over 100 miles (160 kilometers) wide.

tiny amounts of them fall at a more or less constant rate from the deep reaches of outer space as cosmic dust. The Alvarezes reasoned that if the clay layer had only a tiny peppering of iridium, then it had formed very quickly; if it had a larger amount, then it must have formed over a much longer time period.

When the asteroid fell from the sky, it didn’t rudely interrupt some kind of static, idyllic, lost world of the dinosaurs. No, it hit a planet that was in quite a bit of chaos. The big volcanoes in India that the asteroid kicked into overdrive had actually started erupting a few million years before. Temperatures were gradually getting cooler, and sea levels were fluctuating dramatically.

After the asteroid hit, there was probably no one thing that sealed the dinosaurs’ fate. They just had a lot of liabilities working against them. Being small, or having an omnivorous diet, or reproducing quickly—none of these things guaranteed survival, but each one increased the odds