When the very first dinosaurs, like Herrerasaurus and Eoraptor, evolved from their cat-size dinosauromorph ancestors some 240 to 230 million years ago, there were no individual continents—no Australia or Asia or North America. There was no Atlantic Ocean separating the Americas from Europe and Africa, no Pacific Ocean on the flip side of the globe. Instead, there was just one huge solid unbroken mass of land—what geologists refer to as a supercontinent. It was surrounded by a single global ocean. Geography class would have been easy in those days: the supercontinent we call Pangea, and the
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