Dawn of the Dinosaurs
Paleontologists probe the majestic reptiles’ origin and rise
Any 10-year-old knows how the dinosaurs met their end: A huge meteorite slammed into Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula 65 million years ago, blasting the planet beyond anything imagined by Bruce Willis in Armageddon.
But neither kids nor Hollywood have spent much time thinking about how dinosaurs appeared in the first place. “We know a heck of a lot more about the extinction of dinosaurs than their origins,” says Randall Irmis, a paleontologist at the Utah Museum of Natural History and the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.
Lately, though, new discoveries have begun to flesh out the script of dinosaurs’ earliest days. From ghostly footprints in a Polish quarry to the bones of a pint-sized predator in Argentina, these findings tell a more complete and nuanced tale of dinosaur genesis. Dinosaurs, it turns out, were not predestined to rule the planet for more than 130 million years.