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

Absence of evidence is not always evidence of absence, as all good paleontologists must continually remind themselves.

Good reminder of exposure considerations

The fall of these herbivores gave the plant-eating primitive sauropod cousins like Panphagia and Saturnalia an opportunity to seize a new niche in some ecosystems.

Failure of incumbents opened up an opportunity

In evolutionary biology speak, this is called convergence: different types of creatures resembling each other because of similarities in lifestyle and environment. It’s why birds and bats, which both fly, each have wings. It’s why snakes and worms, which both squirm through underground burrows, are both long, skinny, and legless.

Convergence

Here’s the neat trick about a distance matrix in an atlas. You can take that table of road distances between cities, stick it into a statistics software program, run what is called a multivariate analysis, and the program will spit out a plot. Each city will be a point on that plot, and the points will be separated by distance, in perfect proportion. In other words, the plot is a map—a geographically correct map with all of the cities in the right places and distances relative to each other. So

Can you look at target acquisitions and see ones that will be successful? this is a tool to characterize heterogeneity

Some 30 million years after they originated, the dinosaurs had yet to mount a global revolution.

Some things take time

Was there something special about dinosaurs that gave them an edge over the pseudosuchians and other animals that went extinct? Did they grow faster, reproduce quicker, have a higher metabolism, or move more efficiently? Did they have better ways of breathing, hiding, or insulating their bodies during extreme heat and cold snaps? Maybe, but the fact that so many dinosaurs and pseudosuchians looked and behaved so similarly makes such ideas tenuous at best. Maybe dinosaurs were just lucky.

Evolution hypotheses

It’s an astounding feature of biological engineering, made possible by a series of balloonlike air sacs connected to the lung, which store some of the oxygen-rich air taken in during inhalation, so that it can be passed across the lung during exhalation.

Long neck eat lots grew fast birdlik efficient breathing

And that’s advantage four: the air sacs allowed sauropods to have a skeleton that was both sturdy and light enough to move around. Without air sacs, mammals, lizards, and ornithischian dinosaurs had no such luck.

Air sacs

It’s just one of those quirks of geology: some time periods are better represented in the fossil record than others. It’s usually because more rocks were being formed during that time, or rocks of that age have better survived the rigors of erosion, flooding, volcanic eruptions, and all of the other forces that conspire to make fossils difficult to find. When

Survivor Bias

The sauropods weren’t competing for the same plants, but dividing the resources among themselves. The scientific term for this is niche partitioning—when coexisting species avoid competing with each other by behaving or feeding in slightly different ways.

Businesses ?

Sometimes the switch between geological periods happens with a flourish, as when the megavolcanoes closed out the Triassic. Other times, it’s barely noticeable, and more a matter of scientific bookkeeping, a way for geologists to break up long stretches of time without any major changes or catastrophes.

Sometimes divisions are real, sometimes just useful artifice

It is heartbreaking to think of the fossils that have been lost to the dark underworld of illegal dealing and organized crime. But this time, the good guys won.

Organized crime

a child of the Cultural Revolution who staved off hunger by picking wild vegetables. Then, once the winds of politics changed, he studied geology in college, went to Texas to do his PhD, and came back to Beijing to take up one of the most vaunted jobs in Chinese paleontology, a professorship at the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences.

Cultural revolution son also rises political winds change

The press got wind of the discovery—journalists seemed to love the silly nickname—and

Media savvy

Osborn is not remembered very fondly today. He wasn’t a very nice man. He used his wealth and political connections to push pet ideas on eugenics and racial superiority.

Elites

Osborn is probably not the type of guy I would want to have a beer—or more likely, a really fancy cocktail—with if I found myself in Gilded Age New York. (I speculate, but he might not have sat down with me anyway, leery of my very ethnic-sounding Italian name.) Nevertheless, there’s no denying that Osborn was a clever paleontologist and an even better scientific administrator.

Bad and good

Like any good celebrity, Brown was an eccentric. He hunted fossils in the dead of summer in a full-length fur coat, made extra cash spying for governments and oil companies, and had such a fondness for the ladies that rumors of his tangled web of offspring are still whispered throughout the western American plains.

Spies women and weird

It seems tyrannosaurs could get big if they had the opportunity, but only if there were no larger predators around.

Wal mart

A major evolutionary turnover had occurred. Was this due to the lingering effects of the temperature and sea-level changes that occurred at the Cenomanian-Turonian boundary? Was it sudden or gradual? Did tyrannosaurs actively outcompete the carcharodontosaurs, muscling them into extinction or outsmarting them with their big brains and keenly developed senses? Or did environmental changes cause these other large predators to go extinct but spare tyrannosaurs, which then opportunistically took over the large predator role? We just don’t have enough evidence to know for certain, but whatever the answer, there is no denying that by the dawn of the Campanian subinterval of the latest Cretaceous, beginning about 84 million years ago, tyrannosaurs had risen to the top of the food pyramid.

Multiple hypotheses i assume in a complex system all contribute maybe not though? maybe, like all lollapalooza, it’s sequence of multiple models

no dinosaurs were able to do what whales did: start on the land, change their bodies into swimming machines,

Whales were land animals

When Doda drifted off to sleep, Nopcsa put a bullet into him, then turned the gun on himself.

Why kill? Why murder? Seems unloving

But like castles, like empires, and like genius noblemen with a flair for the dramatic, the great dynasties of evolution can also fall—sometimes when least expected.

Fell when least expected

Birds are dinosaurs.

Wow

THE REALIZATION THAT birds are dinosaurs is probably the single most important fact ever discovered by dinosaur paleontologists. Although we’ve learned much about dinosaurs over the past few decades, this is not a radical new idea pushed by my generation of scientists. Quite the opposite: it’s a theory that goes back a long way, to the era of Charles Darwin.

Birds are dinosaurs

Any other conclusion requires a whole lot of special pleading.

Nice phrase

the blueprint that makes a bird a bird.

Phrase

This body plan is behind the many superskills that birds are so renowned for: their ability to fly, their hypercharged growth rates, their warm-blooded physiology, and their high intelligence and sharp senses.

Form supports function

got smart before they took to the skies.

So form gave rise to skills which morphed

What we think of as the bird body plan, therefore, wasn’t so much a fixed blueprint as a Lego set that was put together brick by brick over evolutionary time. The same was true of the classic behavioral, physiological, and biological repertoire of today’s birds. And the same was true of feathers.

Wow great summary

Feathers are nature’s ultimate Swiss Army knife, multipurpose tools that can be used for display, insulation, protection for eggs and babies, and of course, flight.

Lots of option value

Wings, of course, are essential for flight. They are the airfoils that provide lift and thrust. For

I don't know about this area of knowledge

Wings originally evolved as display structures—as advertising billboards projecting from the arms, and in some cases, like Microraptor, the legs, and even the tail. Then these fashionably winged dinosaurs would have found themselves with big broad surfaces that by the unbreakable laws of physics could produce lift and drag and thrust. The earliest winged dinosaurs, like the horse-size ornithomimosaurs and even most raptors like Zhenyuanlong, probably would have considered the lift and drag produced by their billboards to be little more than an annoyance. In any case, whatever lift was generated wasn’t nearly enough to get such large animals into the air. But in more advanced paravians, which had the magic combination of bigger wings and smaller body size, the billboards would have been able to take on an aerodynamic function. These dinosaurs could now move around in the air, even if awkwardly at first. Flight had evolved—and it had happened totally by accident, the billboards now repurposed as airfoils.

Wow

that different dinosaurs were evolving distinct flight styles independently of one another.

Great idea happens mulitiple places