The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs

textbook Dinosaur Paleobiology

No mammal living with dinosaurs got bigger than a badger.

The mammals that lived on were generally smaller than the ones that perished, and they had more omnivorous diets.

asteroid didn’t kill everything. Plenty of animals made it through: frogs, salamanders, lizards and snakes, turtles and crocodiles, mammals, and yes, some dinosaurs—in the guise of birds.

David Fastovsky (author of the best dinosaur textbook on the market)

forams—tiny predators that float around in the ocean plankton

T. rex and the Crater of Doom

comet or an asteroid—we aren’t sure which—collided with the Earth, hitting what is now the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico. It was about six miles (ten kilometers) wide, or about the size of Mount Everest. It was probably moving at a speed of around 67,000 miles per hour (108,000 kilometers per hour), more than a hundred times faster than a jet airliner. When it slammed into our planet, it hit with the force of over 100 trillion tons of TNT, somewhere in the vicinity of a billion nuclear bombs’ worth of energy. It plowed some twenty-five miles (forty kilometers) through the crust and into the mantle, leaving a crater that was over 100 miles (160 kilometers) wide.

birds and other airborne dinosaurs was there, gliding and flapping overhead, when T. rex and Triceratops were duking it out in North America, carcharodontosaurs were chasing titanosaurs south of the equator, and dwarf dinosaurs were hopping across the islands of Europe

A T. rex didn’t just mutate into a chicken one day, but rather, the transition was so gradual that dinosaurs and birds just seem blend into each other on the family tree. Velociraptor, Deinonychus, and Zhenyuanlong are on that “non-bird” side of the genealogy, but were they around today, we would probably consider them just another type of bird, no stranger than a turkey or an ostrich. They had feathers, they had wings, they guarded their nests and cared for their babies,