The Jurassic Period was dominated by dinosaurs on land and marine reptiles in the sea. Sauropods were the largest land animals ever, while pterosaurs were the first vertebrates to evolve flight. The world got hotter and wetter, allowing for more forests on Pangea.
The Jurassic Period was a geological period in the middle of the Mesozoic Era. It spans from about 200 million years ago to 145 million years ago. During the Jurassic period, dinosaurs continued to dominate the land, while marine reptiles such as ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs and marine crocodiles occupied the sea.
The Jurassic Period is one of the most familiar periods of life on Earth to the average person, because it has been widely fictionalized since the initial discovery of dinosaur fossils in the early nineteenth century. The entire Mesozoic is called the “Age of Dinosaurs”, just as the more recent Cenozoic is called the “Age of Mammals”.
Sauropods were the dominant reptiles on land, including Camarasaurus, Diplodocus, Brachiosaurus, and numerous others. The largest sauropods were the largest land animals that ever lived. Biomechanics experts think the largest sauropods approached the theoretical limits of the size a land animal could be and still support its own enormous weight. Some of these animals were so large that they had their brains in their tails, because their nerve impulses couldn’t travel fast enough to the confines of their enormous bodies!
The first birds evolved during the Late Jurassic, and one of the most famous Archeopteryx fossils dates back 150 million years. The edges of Pangea were covered in huge evergreen forests with conifers as tall as those of the largest modern forests.
Rather than being filled with birds, the sky was occupied by the flying reptilian pterosaurs, which were the first vertebrates to evolve flight. Although sometimes erroneously referred to as “dinosaurs,” the term dinosaur specifically refers to the superorder Dinosauria, consisting only of terrestrial reptiles with a unique upright posture. The sea was occupied by ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, and mosasaurs, as it had been shortly after the Permian-Triassic extinction event.
During the Jurassic Period, the world got progressively hotter and wetter, allowing for more forests on the continent of Pangea. Pangea began to widen slightly. The closer proximity of increasing amounts of land to water has modulated temperature extremes, making possible ecological stability and the growth of huge, lush forests.
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