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

by Steve Brusatte

Pangea may have been a united landmass, but its treacherous weather and extreme climates gave it a dangerous unpredictability. It wouldn’t have been a particularly safe or pleasant place to call home. But the very first dinosaurs had no choice. They entered a world still recovering from the terrible mass extinction at the end of the Permian, a land subject to the violent whims of storms and the blight of blistering temperatures. So did many other new types of plants and animals that were getting their start after the mass extinction cleared the planet.

Putting it all together, that’s how you can build a supergiant dinosaur. If sauropods had lacked any one of these features—the long neck, the fast growth rates, the efficient lung, the system of skeleton-lightening and body-cooling air sacs—then they probably would not have been capable of becoming such behemoths. It wouldn’t have been biologically possible. But evolution assembled all of the pieces, put them together in the right order, and when the kit was finally assembled in the post-volcanic world of the Jurassic, sauropods suddenly found themselves able to do something no other animals, before or since, have been able to do. They became biblically huge and swept around the world; they became dominant in the most magnificent way—and they would remain so for another hundred million years.

NESTLED WITHIN THE LEAFY STREETS of New Haven, Connecticut, on the northern fringes of the Yale University campus, there is a shrine. The Great Hall of Dinosaurs at Yale’s Peabody Museum may not bill itself as a place of spiritual pilgrimage, but that’s sure what it feels like to me. I get a shiver, as when I walked into Catholic mass as a child. It’s not a normal shrine—no statues of deities, flickering candles, or the hint of incense. It’s also not particularly magnificent, at least from the outside, tucked away inside a fairly nondescript brick building that blends in with the rest of the university’s lecture halls. But it houses relics that, to me, are as sacred as those you’ll find in most any religious shrine: dinosaurs. To me, there is nowhere better, anywhere on the planet, to go and immerse yourself in the wonder of the prehistoric world.

However, the Uzbek tyrannosaur was still a Mini-Me, just about the size of a horse. In spring 2016, Sasha, Hans, and I gave the Uzbek tyrannosaur a formal scientific name, Timurlengia euotica. The name honors Timur, also known as Tamerlane, the infamous Central Asian warlord who ruled over Uzbekistan and many of the surrounding lands in the fourteenth century.

If a seven-ton, bone-crunching, ambush predator isn’t scary enough on its own, then just imagine a pack of them working together. Sweet dreams!

Torrejonia is one of the oldest primates, a fairly close cousin of ours. It is a stark reminder that we—you, me, all of us humans—had ancestors that were there on that terrible day, that saw the rock fall from the sky, that endured the heat and earthquakes and nuclear winter, that eked out passage across the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary, and then once on the other side, evolved into tree-leapers like Torrejonia.