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

a new species of dinosaur is currently being found, on average, once a week. Let that sink in: a new dinosaur every . . . single . . . week. That’s about fifty new species each year—

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.

Everything I describe above is what we call a body fossil, an actual part of a plant or animal that turns into stone. But there is another type: a trace fossil, which records the presence or behavior of an organism or preserves something that an organism produced. The best example is a footprint; others are burrows, bite marks, coprolites (fossilized dung), and eggs and nests. These can be particularly valuable, because they can tell us how extinct animals interacted with each other and their environment—how they moved, what they ate, where they lived, and how they reproduced.

Dinosaurs lived during three periods of geological history: the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous (which collectively form the Mesozoic Era). The

The first true dinosaurs arose some time between 240 and 230 million years ago. The uncertainty reflects two problems that continue to cause me headaches but are ripe to be solved by the next generation of paleontologists.

But the dinosaurs had arrived on the scene. The three major groups—the meat-eating theropods, long-necked sauropods, and herbivorous ornithischians—had already diverged from each other on the family tree, siblings setting out to form their own broods.

Geography class would have been easy in those days: the supercontinent we call Pangea, and the ocean we call Panthalassa.

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

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.

All throughout the Triassic, the pseudosuchians were significantly more morphologically diverse than dinosaurs. They filled a larger spread of that map, meaning they had a greater range of anatomical features, which indicated that they were experimenting with more diets, more behaviors, more ways of making a living.

Far from being superior warriors slaying their competitors, dinosaurs were being overshadowed by their crocodile-line rivals during the 30 million years they coexisted in the Triassic.

Some of the most famous dinosaurs of all are sauropods: Brontosaurus, Brachiosaurus, Diplodocus. They show up in almost all museum exhibits and are stars of Jurassic Park; Fred Flintstone used one to mine slate, and a green cartoon sauropod has been the logo of Sinclair Oil for decades. Along with T. rex, they are the iconic dinosaurs.

His most famous work is undoubtedly The March of Progress—that often satirized timeline of human evolution in which a knuckle-walking ape gradually morphs into a spear-carrying man.

Not only that, but some of the most important African collections—made by the German aristocrat Ernst Stromer von Reichenbach, from the Early to mid Cretaceous rocks of Egypt—weren’t around anymore. They had the great misfortune of being kept in a museum just a few blocks from Nazi headquarters in Munich and were destroyed by an Allied bombing raid in 1944.

Brown was the first celebrity paleontologist, acclaimed for his lively lectures and a weekly CBS radio show. People would flock to see him as he passed through the American West on trains, and later in his life he helped Walt Disney design the dinosaurs in Fantasia.

So scientists were in a quandary. There were a bunch of huge tyrannosaurs at the top of the food chain thriving at the peak of dinosaur history. Where did they come from?

The drama of a T. rex ambush is coming into focus. The lungs delivered the energy, which was then transferred to the leg muscles, which propelled the Rex forward with a burst of speed to lunge at its startled victim. And then what happened? Just imagine T. rex as a giant land shark. Like a Great White, all of the action was with its head. Rex led with its noggin and used its clamp-strong jaws to grab its dinner, subdue it, kill it, and crunch through its flesh and guts and bones before swallowing.

AND THERE YOU have it, a glimpse into the life and times of the most famous dinosaur in history. T. rex bit so hard it could crunch through the bones of its prey, it was so bulky that it couldn’t run fast as an adult, it grew so fast as a teenager that it put on five pounds a day for a decade, it had a big brain and sharp senses, it hung around in packs, and it was even covered in feathers.

dinosaurs more generally, were incredible feats of evolution, well adapted to their environments, the rulers of their time. Far from being failures, they were evolutionary success stories.

Toward the end of the Cretaceous—when T. rex and Triceratops were fighting in North America, carcharodontosaurs were hunting gigantic sauropods throughout the south, and a parade of dwarfs had colonized the European islands—dinosaurs seemed invincible.

Seagulls, and all other birds, evolved from dinosaurs. That makes them dinosaurs. Put another way, birds can trace their heritage back to the common ancestor of dinosaurs, and therefore are every bit as dinosaurian as T. rex, Brontosaurus, or Triceratops,

Birds are simply a subgroup of dinosaurs, just like the tyrannosaurs or the sauropods—one of the many branches on the dinosaur family tree.

Bats look and behave a whole lot differently than mice or foxes or elephants, but nobody would argue that they’re not mammals. No, bats are just a weird type of mammal that evolved wings and developed the ability to fly. Birds are just a weird group of dinosaurs that did the same thing.

It was a seemingly minor change, which stabilized the shoulder girdle and probably allowed these stealthy, dog-size predators to better absorb the shock forces of grabbing prey. Much later, birds would co-opt the wishbone to serve as a spring that stores energy when they flap their wings. These proto-theropods, however, never could have known this would eventually happen, just as the inventor of the propeller had no idea the Wright Brothers would later put it on an airplane.

most theropods were evolving at ho-hum background rates, but then, once an airworthy bird had emerged, the rates went into overdrive. The first birds were evolving much faster than their dinosaur ancestors and cousins, and they maintained these accelerated rates for many tens of millions of years.

Although it had taken tens of millions of years for evolution to make a flying bird out of a dinosaur, now things were happening very fast, and birds were soaring.

Jingmai calls herself a paleontologista—fitting, given her fashionista style of leopard-print Lycra, piercings, and tattoos, all of which are at home in the club but stand out (in a good way) among the plaid-and-beard crowd that dominates academia.

This is more or less where things stood 66 million years ago. This whole suite of birds and other airborne dinosaurs was there, gliding and flapping overhead, when T. rex and Triceratops were duking it out in North America, carcharodontosaurs were chasing titanosaurs south of the equator, and dwarf dinosaurs were hopping across the islands of Europe. And then they witnessed what came next, the instant that snuffed out almost all of the dinosaurs, all but a few of the most advanced, best-adapted, best-flying birds, which made it through the carnage and are still with us today—among them the seagulls outside my window.

IT WAS THE WORST DAY in the history of our planet. A few hours of unimaginable violence that undid more than 150 million years of evolution and set life on a new course.

Then the rains came. But what fell from the sky was not water. It was beads of glass and chunks of rock, each one scalding hot. The pea-size morsels pelted the surviving dinosaurs, gouging deep burns into their flesh. Many of them were gunned down, and their shredded corpses joined the earthquake victims on the battlefield.

When night finally came and this most horrible of days finally was over, many—maybe even most—of the dinosaurs were dead, all over the world.

Walter called his dad for help. His father just so happened to be a Nobel Prize–winning physicist: Luis Alvarez, who had discovered a host of subatomic particles and had been one of the key players in the Manhattan Project. (He even flew behind the Enola Gay to monitor the effects of Little Boy when it was dropped on Hiroshima.)

The first thing we have to realize is that, although some species did survive the immediate hellfire of the impact and the longer-term climate upheaval, most did not. It’s estimated that some 70 percent of species went extinct. That includes a whole lot of amphibians and reptiles and probably the majority of mammals and birds, so it’s not simply “dinosaurs died, mammals and birds survived,” the line often parroted in textbooks and television documentaries. If not for a few good genes or a few strokes of good luck, our mammalian ancestors might have gone the way of the dinosaurs, and I wouldn’t be here typing this book.