Posted: 3/22/2024 4:51:59 AM EDT
[Last Edit: azmp5][Edited]
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Decided to keep this here vs GD, mostly cause I'm more genuinely curious vs a GD answer. So the wife was watching something on the Earth when I got home from work and it was on the Triassic-Jurassic periods which later evolved to what we have now. The thing that had always blown my mind (literally) is just the span of time they talk about. They will "speed" through 50 million years from each era like its just a small page in a gigantic book. Considering man-kind (in all its forms) has only been on Earth for about 250k years, yet SOMEHOW, dinosaurs and other life had lasted 500 million years. So my question is, and I understand no one was alive to see/document it, but besides the changes in weather, volcanoes, plate tectonics, ect... what all happened during that time? Or did life just live and magically survive abd thats it for 3 billion years. Also, just cause I'm genuinely interested, can anyone point me in the direction of some literature or videos that may go more in depth on this? |
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Not sure why you would compare the presence of homo sapiens to the presence of dinosaurs .......... different species. Anyway, the honest answer is that the evidence (so far) indicates _________ happened. There is a lot written about all that and as new evidence emerges through improved analysis tools the theories improve. That's just good science. |
When you have to shoot, shoot. Don't talk.
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LOTS happened. The Permian ended with the "Great Dying", largest extinction event in history, and the Triassic started. So many species (85%+) of EVERYTHING, plants and animals, sea and land, went extinct that lots and lots of evolutionary niches became open with nothing filling them. The result was all kinds of things started to evolve in an explosion of evolutionary diversity. This was the start of the dinosaurs, mammals, pterosaurs, and the two dominant types of animals at the time, the pseudosuchians and a branch of reptiles called archosaurs along with the seas seeing the first ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs. The Triassic ended with another extinction event that took out the last of the archosaurs and forced the pseudosuchians to evolve into other things or die. This is when the Dinosaurs became dominant as the Triassic ended and the Jurassic started. |
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Lots of things happened. We are pretty confident about those things we have evidence of. Time however is a bitch and is phenomenal at destroying evidence, even within years/decades... let alone in the spans of millions/billions of years. Given long enough even things that we consider extremely important historic events will become forever lost to time. |
"Always consider the possibility that you may be wrong. Especially when you are absolutely certain you are right."
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The end Permian/Triassic extinction event was the deepest mass extinction in Earth's history. We lost 57% of all biological families and about 80% of the vertebrates. They call it the great dying. Earth was super hot and dry in the early Triassic and life slowly clawed it's way back into open niches. I'm sure lots of stuff happened, just nothing as significant as the end permian that seems to have made room for dinosaurs to emerge and the impact event that seems to have ended them. The whole dinosaur age was much warmer than today, with temperate to subtropical poles and tropics too hot for large mammals. |
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Originally Posted By azmp5: ... besides the changes in weather, volcanoes, plate tectonics, ect... what all happened during that time? Or did life just live and magically survive and that's it for 3 billion years. Also, just cause I'm genuinely interested, can anyone point me in the direction of some literature or videos that may go more in depth on this? Earth was struck by a massive asteroid which ended the "age of dinosaurs". That's one thing that happened. |
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OP should re-read OZYMANDIUS and consider how it might apply to the Age of the Dinosaurs. One thing about a lot of these dinosaur archaeology programs that makes me BARF! is how they anthropomorphize the dinosaurs. Hell, they don't have even a single bone, not even one, much less so any evidence of actual dinosaur "thinking" or behavior. I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desart.[d] Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed: And on the pedestal these words appear: "My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away. — Percy Shelley, "Ozymandias", 1819 edition[16] |