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

its maximum speed was probably in the ballpark of ten to twenty-five miles per hour. That’s faster than we can run, but it’s not as quick as a racehorse

T. rex had the same lungs. They are the lungs of today’s birds: rigid bellows anchored to the backbone, able to extract oxygen when the animal breaths in and also when it breathes out. They’re different from our lungs, which can take in oxygen only during inhalation, then spew out carbon dioxide during exhalation. They are a stunning feat of biological engineering. When today’s birds—and also T. rex—breathe in, oxygen-rich air courses through the lungs as you would expect. However, some of the inhaled air doesn’t go through the lungs right away but is shunted into a system of sacs connected to the lung. There it waits, until it is released when the animal exhales, passing through the lungs and delivering its oxygen-rich hit even as carbon dioxide waste is being expelled. Birds get twice the bang for the buck, a continuous supply of energy-sustaining oxygen.

Rex’s seemingly sad arms actually turned out to have powerful shoulder extensors and elbow flexors—exactly those muscles needed to hold on to something that is trying to pull away, to keep it close to the chest. It seems that T. rex used its short but strong arms to hold down struggling prey while the jaws did their bone-crunching thing. The arms were accessories to murder.

straightforward measure that scientists use to roughly compare the intelligence of different animals. It’s called the encephalization quotient (EQ). It’s basically a measure of the relative size of the brain compared to the size of the body

The largest tyrannosaurs like T. rex had an EQ in the range of 2.0 to 2.4. By comparison, our EQ is about 7.5, dolphins come in around 4.0 to 4.5, chimps at about 2.2 to 2.5, dogs and cats are in the 1.0 to 1.2 range, and mice and rats languish around 0.5. Based on these numbers, we can say that Rex was roughly as smart as a chimp and more intelligent than dogs and cats. That’s a whole lot smarter than the dinosaurs of stereotype.

Thus it wasn’t all brute strength. T. rex had brawn all right, but it also had brains. High intelligence, world-class sense of smell, keen hearing and vision.

cut open a bone, you can see a record of each time growth transitions from rapid to slow: a ring. That’s right—just like trees, bones have rings inside, and because that summer-to-winter switch happens once a year, that means one ring is laid down each year. By counting the rings you can tell how old a dinosaur was when it died.

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.

Everything we have learned about T. rex tells us that it, and 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. They were also remarkably similar to animals of today, particularly birds—Rex had feathers, grew rapidly, and even breathed like a bird. Dinosaurs were not alien creatures. No, they were real animals that had to do what all animals do: grow, eat, move, and reproduce. And none of them did it better than T. rex, the one true King.

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. There were more species than ever before, from pint-size ones to giants, eating all kinds of foods, endowed with a spectacular variety of crests, horns, spikes, feathers, claws, and teeth. Dinosaurs at the top of their game, doing as well or better than they had ever done, still in control more than 150 million years after their earliest ancestors were born on Pangea.

They happened upon the best, most complete skeleton of a teenage T. rex that had ever been found. It was the keystone fossil that told paleontologists that the King was a gangly, long-snouted, thin-toothed sprinter as a youngster, before it metamorphosed into a truck-size bone-crunching brute as an adult.

Mike Henderson & Scott Campbell from the Burpee Museum in Rockford, Illinois.

Triceratops, like its arch-nemesis T. rex, is a dinosaur icon. In films and documentaries, it usually plays the gentle, sympathetic plant-eater, the perfect dramatic foil to the Tyrant King.

Triceratops making up some 40 percent of Hell Creek dinosaur fossils, T. rex coming in second at about 25 percent. The King needed immense amounts of flesh to fuel its metabolism; its three-horned comrade was fourteen tons of slow-moving prime steak.

Triceratops is a new type of dinosaur in our story. It belongs to a group of plant-eating ornithischians called ceratopsians, which descended from some of the small, fast-running, leaf-toothed critters like Heterodontosaurus and Lesothosaurus of the Early Jurassic.

They switched from walking on their hind legs to plodding along on all fours and started to develop a wardrobe variety of horns and frills on their heads,

As ceratopsids got bigger over time—morphing into bovine versions of dinosaurs that were very common in North America during the latest Cretaceous—they changed their jaws so that they could engulf unholy quantities of plants. They packed their teeth closely together so that the jaws were essentially blades—four in all, one on each side of the upper jaw and one on each side of the lower. The jaws would snap shut in a simple up-and-down motion, the opposing blades slicing past each other like a guillotine. At the front of the snout was a razor-sharp beak, which would pluck the stems and leaves and deliver them to the blades. Triceratops surely was as good at eating plants as T. rex was at devouring meat.

Finding a Triceratops was another coup for the Burpee Museum, exactly what it needed to accompany the teenage T. rex in the new exhibit space. From the moment Helmuth showed us the bones in the ground, I could tell that Mike and Scott were thinking exactly that. Helmuth too—and as the discoverer of the new dinosaur, he got to give it a nickname. Like me he is a big fan of The Simpsons, so he decided to call it Homer. One day, we surmised, Homer would join Jane in the halls of the Burpee Museum.

The map and bone inventory revealed something peculiar. There were three copies of the same bone: three left nasals, the bone that makes up the front and side of the snout. Each Triceratops had only one left nasal, the same way it had only one head or one brain. Then it dawned on us: we had three Triceratopses: not only Homer, but Bart and Lisa too. Helmuth had found a Triceratops graveyard. It was the first time that anybody had found more than one Triceratops in the same place. Until Helmuth walked into that gully, we thought Triceratops was a solitary animal—and we were fairly confident, because Triceratops was so common, already known from hundreds of fossils found over a hundred years, each one a single individual, encountered on its own. But one discovery can change everything, and because of what Helmuth found, we now think that Triceratops was a pack species.

some of the other large, horned ceratopsian species living in other parts of North America during the final 20 million years of the Cretaceous—were social creatures that cohabited in big groups. One of these species, Centrosaurus, which lived in modern-day Alberta about 10 million years before Triceratops and had a giant horn rising from its nose, has also been found in a bone bed—not a modest bonebed like the Homer site, but one covering an area of nearly three hundred football fields and entombing more than a thousand individuals.

these dinosaurs probably moved across Late Cretaceous western North America in vast herds, many thousands strong, rumbling the ground and kicking up clouds of dust as they plowed across the landscape, not much unlike the bison that would conquer the same plains many millions of years later.

Ceratopsids.

human-size omnivorous theropods called oviraptorosaurs—weird, toothless dinosaurs with flamboyant crests of bone atop their skulls and sharp beaks adapted to eat a whole variety of food, from nuts and shellfish to plants and small mammals and lizards.

This was the Late Cretaceous of North America, the final flourish of the dinosaurs before disaster struck. Because of the wealth of fossils discovered by everyone from Barnum Brown to the teams from the Burpee Museum, it is the single richest dinosaur ecosystem known to science during the entire Age of Dinosaurs anywhere in the world, our best picture of how a variety of dinosaurs lived together and fit together into one food chain.

Spend a day walking through the Hell Creek badlands in Montana, and you’ll probably find several T. rex teeth—they’re that common.

sauropods. Hordes of them. T. rex didn’t chase down any of these long-necked titans up in ancient Montana, as sauropods seemed to have disappeared from most of North America some time during the middle part of the Cretaceous (although they still did frequent the southern reaches of the continent). Not so in Brazil or the other austral lands. There sauropods remained the primary large-bodied plant-eaters, right up to the end of the Age of Dinosaurs.

many skeletons of similar-size animals found in Brazil, but they are crocodiles, not theropods. Some of them were fairly standard water dwellers that probably wouldn’t have competed very much with dinosaurs, but others were bizarre animals adapted for living on the land, so unlike today’s crocs. Baurusuchus was a long-legged, doglike pursuit predator. Mariliasuchus had teeth that looked like the incisors, canines, and molars of mammals, which it probably used like pigs to eat a smorgasbord omnivorous diet. Armadillosuchus was a burrower with bands of flexible body armor, and it may have been able to roll up in the style of an armadillo, hence its name. None of these animals lived in North America, as far as we know. It seems that, in Brazil and throughout the Southern Hemisphere, these crocodiles were filling ecological niches held by dinosaurs in other parts of the world.

OF ALL THE people who have ever studied dinosaurs, collected dinosaur bones, or even thought about dinosaurs in any serious way, there’s never been anybody quite like Franz Nopcsa von Felső-Szilvás. Baron Franz Nopcsa von Felső-Szilvás, I should say, because this man was literally an aristocrat who dug up dinosaur bones. He seems like the invention of a mad novelist, a character so outlandish, so ridiculous, that he must be a trick of fiction. But he was very real—a flamboyant dandy and a tragic genius, whose exploits hunting dinosaurs in Transylvania were brief respites from the insanity of the rest of his life.

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, enduring the leers of their peers, surviving the disintegration of their respective empires, traveling Europe by motorcycle (Nopcsa on the bike, Doda in a sidecar). Doda was by Nopcsa’s side when, in the chaos before the Great War, the baron plotted an insurgency of mountain men against the Turks—even smuggling in firearms to build an arsenal—and then later tried to install himself as king of Albania. Both schemes failed, so Nopcsa turned to other pursuits. As it turned out, that would be dinosaurs.

Nopcsa continued to collect Transylvanian dinosaurs for much of the rest of his life, taking breaks here and there when his services were needed in Albania. He studied them, too, and in doing so was one of the first people who made any attempt to grasp what dinosaurs were like as real animals, not simply bones to be classified. He had a genius when it came to interpreting fossils, and it didn’t take him very long to notice that something was odd about the bones he was finding on his estate. He could tell that they belonged to groups that were common in other parts of the world—a new species that he named Telmatosaurus was a duckbill, a long-necked critter called Magyarosaurus was a sauropod, and he also found the bones of armored dinosaurs.

At first Nopcsa thought the bones belonged to juveniles, but when he put them under a microscope, he realized that they had the characteristic textures of adults. There was only one suitable explanation: these Transylvanian dinosaurs were miniatures.

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, which emerged from the water some time during the latest Cretaceous. The mini-dinosaurs were living on a small bit of turf, probably around thirty thousand square miles (eighty thousand square kilometers) in area, about the size of Hispaniola.

Later research showed that Nopcsa was correct, and his dwarf dinosaurs are now regarded as a prime example of the “island effect” in action.

in autumn 2009, Mátyás made the most important discovery of his life. He was out prospecting with his boys when he saw some chalk-white lumps poking out from the rusty red rocks on the bank a few feet above the waterline. Bones. He took out his tools and scratched into the soft mudrock, and more kept coming: the limbs and torso of a poodle-size critter. Excitement quickly turned to fear: the local power station would soon be discharging a surge of water into the river, and the rising currents would probably wash away the bones. So Mátyás worked quickly, but with the precision of a surgeon, and cut the skeleton out of its 69-million-year-old tomb.

Mark Norell, the dinosaur curator at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, the guy with Barnum Brown’s old job.

We both agreed the bones looked like a theropod’s, and when we did a bit of research, we realized that no good meat-eating dinosaur skeletons had ever been found in Transylvania. Mark replied to Mátyás and they struck up a friendship, and a few months later, the three of us found ourselves together in the February chill of Bucharest.

one of Mátyás’s colleagues, a thirty-something professor named Zoltán Csiki-Sava,

All of the bones were laid out before us on a table, and it was up to us four to identify them. Seeing the specimen with our own eyes, we had no doubt it was a theropod. Many of its light, delicate bones resembled those of Velociraptor and other lithe, fierce raptor species. It was about the same size as Velociraptor, too, or maybe a tad smaller. But something didn’t quite fit. Mátyás’s dinosaur had four big toes on each foot, the two inner ones bearing huge, sickle-shaped claws. The raptors were famous for their retractable sickle claws—which they used to slash and gut their prey—but they had only one on each foot. Besides, they had only three main toes, not four. We were stuck in a quandary, and it seemed that we might have a new dinosaur on our hands.

Finally it dawned on us. This new Romanian theropod was a raptor, but a peculiar one, with extra toes and claws compared to its mainland relatives.

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. As best we can tell, it was the largest carnivorous dinosaur on the islands.

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. 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.

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, the same way my cousins and I are Brusattes because we trace our lineage back to the same grandfather.

Pterosaurs were the first group of vertebrates (animals with backbones) to evolve wings and fly. Dinosaurs—in the guise of birds—were the second.

The year was 1859. After two decades of sitting around and stewing over the observations he made as a young man sailing the world on the HMS Beagle, Darwin was finally ready to go public with his startling discovery: species are not fixed entities; they evolve over time. He even had a mechanism to explain evolution, a process he called natural selection. That November, he laid it all out in the Origin of Species.

For many of Darwin’s supporters, the ultimate proof of his new theory would be “missing links,” transitional fossils that capture, like a freeze frame, the evolution of one type of animal into another. These would not only demonstrate evolution in action, but could visually convey it to the public in a way that no book or lecture ever could. Darwin didn’t have to wait long. In 1861, quarry workers in Bavaria found something peculiar.

split open a slab and found a 150-million-year-old skeleton of a Frankenstein creature inside. It had sharp claws and a long tail like a reptile but feathers and wings like a bird. Other fossils of the same animal were soon found in other limestone quarries that sprinkled the Bavarian countryside, including a spectacular one that preserved nearly the entire skeleton. This one had a wishbone, like a bird, but its jaws were lined with sharp teeth, like a reptile. Whatever this creature was, it seemed to be half reptile, half bird. This Jurassic hybrid was named Archaeopteryx, and it became a sensation. Darwin included it in later editions of the Origin of Species as evidence that birds had a deep history which could be explained only by evolution.

Thomas Henry Huxley is perhaps best remembered as the man who came up with the term agnosticism

he proposed his own radical new idea: birds descended from dinosaurs.

The feather-covered skeleton of Archaeopteryx, the oldest bird in the fossil record.

in 1969,

A new generation—led by an unassuming Yale professor named John Ostrom and his rambunctious student Robert Bakker—completely reimagined dinosaurs, even making the argument that dinosaurs lived together in herds, had keen senses, cared for their young, and may have been warm-blooded like us.

if some dinosaurs did have feathers, that would be the final jab in the gut to the few old-blood holdovers who didn’t accept the connection between dinosaurs and birds. The problem, though, is that Ostrom and Bakker couldn’t be sure if dinosaurs like Deinonychus had feathers. All they had were bones.