The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: The Sunday Times Bestseller, The Untold Story of a Lost World

by Steve Brusatte

the end of the Permian was a very bad time to be alive. It was the biggest episode of mass death in the history of our planet. Somewhere around 90 percent of all species disappeared.

Absence of evidence is not always evidence of absence,

Instead, over a period of some six hundred thousand years, there were four big pulses of drama, when enormous amounts of lava would surge out of the Pangean rift zone like tsunamis from hell. I’m hardly exaggerating: some of the flows were, added up together, up to three thousand feet thick; they could have buried the Empire State Building twice over. In all, some three million square miles of central Pangea were drowned in lava. It goes without saying that this was a bad time to be a dinosaur,

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, the same way my cousins and I are Brusattes because we trace our lineage back to the same grandfather. Birds are simply a subgroup of dinosaurs, just like the tyrannosaurs or the sauropods—one of the many branches on the dinosaur family tree.