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Texas ISD School Guide
Texas ISD School Guide







Short Stories for Teachers

Dinosaur Facts
By:Sunil Tanna <webmaster@ans2000.com>

Dinosaurs are a group of extinct reptiles that first appeared during the middle of the Triassic Period, perhaps around 230 million years ago. They soon became the dominant land vertebrates, and continued evolve through the rest of the entire Mesozoic Era. During this time, different species of dinosaurs evolved and then disappeared, but the very last dinosaurs only became extinct at the Mesozoic Era, in a mass extinction which occurred 65 million years ago, and is known as the "Cretaceous-Tertiary mass extinction".

Dinosaurs were a very diverse group of animals. They range from animals about the size of a chicken, to animals well over 100 feet (30 meters) long. They included herbivores (plant eaters), and carnivores (meat eaters), and they lived in every continent of the world including the Antarctic and polar regions (although the continents were arranged differently then and the climate was warmer than today).

Dinosaurs, along with a vast array of other animals including Pterosaurs, many marine reptiles such as Mosasaurs and Plesiosaurs, and some marine invertebrates such Ammonites and Belemnites, became extinct in some great disaster that occurred at the end of the Cretaceous Period. Scientists have proposed various explanations of what this disaster may have been - it must have been something with planet-wide effects - and currently the lead theories are an asteroid impact or extreme volcanism, either of which could have blotted out the sun and killed plant life all over the Earth leading to a catastrophic collapse of food chains.

Although the dinosaurs are long since gone, they did leave some descendents, namely the birds. Because of the discovery of fossils such as Archaeopteryx, most scientists do now believe that birds are descended from dinosaurs - that's something to think next time you sit down to a chicken dinner!






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