Two hundred million years ago, ancient reptiles ruled our planet. It was the crown of creation of that time! No other animal class has held "power" for as long as the reptiles.
There were many of them - ancient lizards, crocodiles, tuatara, but dinosaurs, of course, became the pinnacle of their development. Beast Lizards lived everywhere: on land, in water, in the air!
Dinosaur Science
Ancient reptiles left behind a lot of mysteries that not everyone can solve. Based on the remains of the bones of animal lizards, with a competent approach, you can “draw” a picture of the past: the external data of the lizard, its lifestyle, and so on. This is what paleontologists do. Their work is somewhat reminiscent of the work of detectives: they have to restore a whole period of the life of a giant reptile from broken fragments! Here you need to be able to competently combine your intuition with logic and imagination, collecting the smallest fragments of the "past life" of a particular dinosaur.
Restoring pictures of the past is not an easy task. Without fantasy and a well-developed consistent imagination, there is noget by. Paleontology is to some extent a creative science: even a seemingly insignificant fact, if properly substantiated, can play an important role in the chain of events of that era … The Age of Dinosaurs!
A bit of classification
Reptiles are a rather peculiar group of living creatures. The fact is that this class is divided into subclasses, the most primitive and ancient of which are the so-called anapsids. The last of them died out two hundred million years ago. A separate branch of this group is the synapsids. These are the ancestors of mammals. The synapsids themselves did not live to see the flowering of their descendants. Still later, an offshoot of the diapsids appeared, which in turn split into lepidosaurs and archosaurs. The former include both lizards, snakes, hatteria living in our time, and some extinct marine predators with long and snake-like necks called plesiosaurs. Archosaurs include crocodiles, pterosaurs, and dinosaurs. These ancient reptiles are almost all extinct. Only the crocodiles remained. Are they the only descendants of ancient reptiles? Not really!
Feathered heritage
Direct descendants of dinosaurs are birds. Although this is not a class of Reptiles, it is precisely the birds that resemble ancient lizards in their structure and appearance. At the same time, feel the difference: birds are the descendants of non-flying animal lizards such as the Quetzalcoatl pterosaur, namely, “ground” dinosaurs! The flying lizards died out without a legacy.
The death of a dynasty
Ancient reptiles were very diverse and numerous, no other group of animals could compare with them in their perfection and organization. Lizardmen have been studied and continue to be studied with more interest than other extinct animals. The collapse of the "empire of dinosaurs" still gives rise to a lot of theories, disputes, versions. For whatever reason, the death of a dynasty of reptiles ruling the world did not occur, several million years passed before the Earth was able to recover from a global catastrophe. When this nevertheless happened, the giant dinosaurs no longer found a place on it. They are dead forever. Instead, others appeared - beautiful and strong animals! But you and I already know that one small group of descendants of ancient reptiles still managed to survive, and today its representatives are all around us … These are birds!
