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Audiobooks Narrated by Gregory T. Luzitano
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Beginning in the Triassic but especially in the Jurassic period, reptiles came to dominate the oceans, the land and even the skies. There has never been anything else quite like this period in terms of the success of a particular type of creature. For almost two hundred million years, reptiles were the only significant creatures on Earth. They were so successful and so diverse that they evolved to take advantage of every available habitat and no other type of large creature had a chance to develop.
To put the two hundred million years of reptile dominance in perspective, the entire span of recorded Human history, the time since people advanced from tribes of primitive, nomadic hunter-gatherers into recognizable societies, covers less than six thousand years. To put this in context, if the entire history of the planet were to be laid out on the length of a football field, the period of dominance of the age of reptiles would not begin until the five-yard line and would stretch for twelve feet. All of Human history would occupy a tiny strip at the end of the field, less than the width of a human hair.
It was during the Jurassic period that reptiles began to rule the Earth and some of the best-known prehistoric creatures first emerged. This is the fascinating, complex and occasionally baffling story of the Jurassic period.
Early societies were aware of fossils, but they had no conception of just how old they were; the ancient Chinese, for example, classified many fossils as the bones of dragons. It wasn't until 1822 that a new word was coined, "paleontology," and it was used to describe the emerging science of using the fossil record to understand what the world was like in the far distant past.
Gradually, a better understanding emerged of the different periods through which the Earth had passed and a realization that for hundreds of millions of years, it wasn't humans but a very different species that ruled the Earth. By the 1840s, paleontologists began to give names to different eras in an attempt to describe this history and to further subdivide eras into periods. Many of those period names are now very familiar, Jurassic and Triassic, for example, but there was an 80-million-year period in which the planet changed completely: the Cretaceous. This period began with dinosaurs as the dominant species on Earth, with mammals restricted to a few small rodents cowering in holes. By its end, the continents had begun to resemble a modern map, the dinosaurs had all but disappeared, and new species arose to dominance.
The Cretaceous Period: The History and Legacy of the Geologic Era that Ended with the Extinction of Dinosaurs looks at the development of the era, the extinction events that preceded it and ended it, and the aftermath.
