![]() What was the thinking that it only took a million or two years for the big dinosaur explosion to have happened?īrusatte: Yeah. Mirsky: So, 50 million years is what it really took, it looks like. It took a good 50 million years or so for those animals to diversify, to grow in size to become the dinosaurs that we all know and love. But they were the stock that gave rise to the dinosaurs. These were the animals that dinosaurs came from. They were these awkward, gangly-looking animals that were sprinting around on four stilty legs. The very closest relatives of dinosaurs, these things called dinosauromorph, the immediate ancestors of the dinosaurs they were just the size of a house cat. It turns out that the very first dinosaurs were quite small. There have been so many new fossil discoveries over the last decade or so, fossils of the very first dinosaurs, the animals living with the first dinosaurs. That once they originated, they had such an advanced biology and advanced type of body that they spread all around the world, that they spread around almost like an infectious virus, that they outcompeted the other animals of the day way back in the Triassic period, the days of the supercontinent, Pangea. The thinking was that it happened quite suddenly, that dinosaurs were superior, that there was something about them. For a long time, there was a real mystery about how dinosaurs rose up to become animals like that. These are fierce, huge, dominant creatures. rex or if you watch one of these dinosaur documentaries on television and you see the CGI Brontosaurus thundering around, these are majestic animals. If you go to a museum and you stand underneath the skeleton of a T. It took them a while to get started.īrusatte: That's right. ![]() But, according to the article and some of what's in your book, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World, it's not necessarily the case. You talk about the fact that for a long time, it seems like among the public and in the scientific community, it was kind of an assumption that dinosaurs were an instant success, instant in terms of geological time scales, evolutionary time scales. “The Unlikely Triumph of Dinosaurs," your article in the May issue of Scientific American. Plus, his book, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs was published just last month. He wrote the cover story on dinosaurs in the May issue of Scientific American. Although, as you can tell from his accent, he's American, educated at the University of Chicago, Columbia University, and the American Museum of Natural History. He's a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh. They had to deal with drifting continents and volcanoes and asteroids and rising and falling sea levels, changes in temperatures. These were animals that ruled the world for 150 million years. But they're more than just movie monsters or a childhood obsession. Steve Mirsky: Welcome to Scientific American Science Talk, posted on May 23, 2018. However, the partially recovered dinosaur “can be considered one of the largest titanosaurs,” experts said, with a probable body mass exceeding or comparable to that of a Patagotitan or Argentinosaurus.Edinburgh University paleontologist Steve Brusatte talks about his May 2018 Scientific American article, " The Unlikely Triumph of the Dinosaurs," and his new book, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World. Without analyzing the dinosaur’s humerus or femur, experts say it is not yet possible to say how much the creature weighs. But the biggest “multi-ton” varieties of the species – including those titanosaurs exceeding 40 tons – have mostly been discovered in Patagonia. Titanosaur fossils have been found on all continents except Antarctica. “It is a huge dinosaur, but we expect to find much more of the skeleton in future field trips, so we’ll have the possibility to address with confidence how really big it was,” Alejandro Otero, a paleontologist with Argentina’s Museo de La Plata, told CNN via email. Massachusetts might soon have an official state dinosaur. Jack Patrick Lewis announced this week that he is planning to propose a bill to adopt a State Dinosaur.
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