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,
