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

by Steve Brusatte

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.