The Mesozoic Era, often called the “Age of Dinosaurs,” spans three distinct periods: the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous. Each period hosted unique ecosystems with different predators, prey relationships, and environmental conditions. When comparing the Jurassic Period (201-145 million years ago) with the Cretaceous Period (145-66 million years ago), paleontologists examine fossil evidence, ancient environments, and ...
About 66 million years ago, a massive asteroid smashed into Earth at what is now the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico. That event — the Chicxulub impact — is widely credited with triggering the end-Cretaceous mass extinction, wiping out the non-avian dinosaurs and about three-quarters of Earth’s species. But beyond the dramatic blast and global climate ...
You live on a planet that has been endlessly reshaping itself for billions of years, but most days you only notice the potholes. Every so often, though, you stumble into a landscape so strange, so dramatic, that you can almost hear the planet talking. In the United States, a handful of places do this especially ...
When you imagine where alien life might be hiding, you probably picture distant planets bathed in starlight, not pitch-black seafloors on your own world. Yet some of the most compelling clues for life elsewhere may be bubbling up right now from deep ocean vents, far below the waves you see at the surface. Down there, ...
When you picture the early Earth, you might think of a quiet blue planet slowly settling into calm oceans and gentle skies. In reality, if you could step back in time more than three and a half billion years, you would be dropped into an alien world so violent, toxic, and unfamiliar that you probably ...
You probably think of the Grand Canyon as an old place already, but the story you see from the rim is only the final chapter of a book that started more than a billion and a half years ago. When you stand there looking across that enormous chasm, you are not just staring at a ...
You live on a planet that has been breaking itself apart, colliding, drowning in oceans, and erupting in lava for billions of years – and you can actually see the scars. All across the United States, ordinary-looking cliffs, canyons, and road cuts quietly hold records of vanished seas, supervolcanoes, and floods that made modern disasters ...
When you step into Petrified Forest National Park, you are not just visiting another desert landscape; you are walking straight into deep time. The logs at your feet began as living trees more than two hundred million years ago, long before the Grand Canyon even existed and long before dinosaurs like Tyrannosaurus ever walked the ...
If you have even a hint of dinosaur fever, the word “Badlands” probably sends a little shiver down your spine. You picture striped cliffs, lonely buttes, and somewhere out there, a weathered bone just waiting for you to spot it. The truth is, the world’s badlands really are some of the richest dinosaur graveyards on ...
If you could step into a time machine and roll the clock back hundreds of millions of years, the first thing that would shock you is the map. The world you know today, with its familiar outlines of continents, simply did not exist. Continents were fused into supercontinents or torn apart into drifting islands of ...
