Two hundred million years ago, the lords of our planet were ancient reptiles. It was the crown of creation of that time! No other animal class has held onto power for as long as reptiles.
There were many of them - ancient lizards, crocodiles, hatteria, but dinosaurs naturally became the peak of their development. Beastmen lived everywhere: on land, in water, in the air!
Dinosaur science
Ancient reptiles left behind many puzzles that not everyone can solve. Based on the remains of the bones of the animals, with a competent approach, you can "draw" a picture of the past: the external data of the pangolin, its lifestyle and so on. This is what paleontologists do. Their work is somewhat reminiscent of the work of detectives: they have to restore an entire period of the life of a giant reptile from broken shards 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 dinosaur.
Restoring pictures of the past is not an easy task. Fantasy and a well-developed consistent imagination are not enough. Paleontology is to some extent a creative science: even a fact that seems insignificant if properly substantiated can play an important role in the chain of events of that era ... The era of dinosaurs!
A little classification
Reptiles are a rather peculiar group of living things. The fact is that this class is divided into subclasses, the most primitive and oldest of which are the so-called anapsids. The last of them became extinct two hundred million years ago. A separate branch of this group is synapsids. These are the ancestors of mammals. The synapsids themselves did not live up to the heyday of their descendants. Later, the diapsid branch appeared, which in turn was divided into lepidosaurs and archosaurs. The first 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 almost all died out. There were only crocodiles. Are they the only descendants of ancient reptiles? Not certainly in that way!
Feathered heritage
The direct descendants of dinosaurs are birds. Although this is not a class of Reptiles, it is precisely the birds that are reminiscent of ancient dinosaurs by their structure and appearance. At the same time, feel the difference: the birds are the descendants of non-flying animal hunters such as the Quetzalcoatl pterosaur, namely the “land” dinosaurs! Flying dinosaurs became extinct, leaving no legacy.
The death of the dynasty
Ancient reptiles were very diverse and numerous, in their perfection and organization, no other group of animals could compare with them . The animals were studied and continue to be studied with greater interest than other extinct animals. The collapse of the "dinosaur empire" still gives rise to a lot of theories, disputes, versions. For whatever reason, the death of the dynasty of reptiles ruling all over the world took place, several million years passed before the Earth could recover from a global catastrophe. When this nevertheless happened, the giant dinosaurs no longer found a place on it. They became extinct 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 everywhere around us ... These are birds!