Up until then, almost everyone thought that the primitive dinosauromorphs were an uninteresting ancestral stock whose only destiny was to give birth to the mighty dinosaurs. Once that job was done, they could quietly fade away to extinction. But here they were, all over Late Triassic North America, even a new poodle-size species called Dromomeron in the Hayden Quarry, living alongside proper dinosaurs for some 20 million years.
