Postcards From Pangaea

I assume every dinosaur enthusiast out there is well aware that this year of 2023 marks the 30 th anniversary of the Jurassic Park movie. I was 13 back then and its release was a big deal for those of us who were just the right age to be absolutely delighted to see the most believable dinosaurs ever shown on a screen. We had huge expectations, and boy did the film deliver the goods. Even then I was able to spot some scientific inaccuracies due to artistic license ( T. rex had actually excellent eyesight, and those were definitely not Velociraptors ) and the plot’s inconsistencies (for instance, the T. rex seems to be heavy enough to make the earth shake with every step and form waves in the kids’ water cups, but the earth conveniently forgets to shake later on when Rexy unexpectedly appears to save Grant and the kids from the raptors… didn’t I already talk about this before? ). And yet, it remains a wonderful adventure movie, thanks mainly to Spielberg’s masterful...

When I was a kid obsessed with dinosaurs, my favorite time period in the Mesozoic Era was the Late Jurassic by a mile. Sure, there was no T.rex , no Triceratops , no Velociraptor and no Ankylosaurus yet . And those are among many people’s favorite dinosaurs. The Cretaceous period is the one that gave us the most popular dinosaurs. But the Late Jurassic was The Amazing Age of the Giants for me. It was the time of the giant sauropods: the long and slender Diplodocus , the bulky but muscular Brontosaurus , the colossal Brachiosaurus . The time of the plated herbivorous Stegosaurus , with a weight of 3.5 metric tons and a brain the size of a walnut. Those herbivores shared the land with the mighty Allosaurus and Ceratosaurus , animals that, while not as big and robust as a T. rex , were apex predators nonetheless that herbivores of the time had all the reasons in the world to fear, especially the young or sick. It was also a time of heavy contrasts. The biggest dinosaurs shared their ...

Back in the 1980s and 1990s, when I was growing up, it seemed like every dinosaur book available to the general public ( with few notable exceptions ) had to have a section dedicated to other prehistoric animals that shared the world of the Mesozoic Era with them , most often marine reptiles (plesiosaurs, ichthyosaurs and mosasaurs), flying reptiles (pterosaurs), occasionally mammals and their relatives ( synapsids ) and almost always there was a subsection dedicated to Archaeopteryx (“old wing”) . And there was a good reason for that. “Archie”, as it is affectionately known (or Urvogel -” primeval bird”- in Germa n ), was the n universally considered both the oldest bird known by science and an important transitional fossil between reptiles and birds. It was fully feathered, had wings for arms, had big eyes and brain, and also had developed a wishbone, like modern birds. But it also had clawed “hands” on its wings, pointy teeth in its mouth, a long bony tail and a skeleton that ...