The Surprising History (and Future) of Dinosaurs

Heinrich Harder, Pteranodon. Reconstructed by Hans Jochen Ihle, 1982.

Most dinosaurs are dusted off as fragmentary skeletons. Paleontologists like Stephen Brusatte, author of the recent book, The Rise and Fall of Dinosaurs, say they are “scrappy.” But those few bones can be enough to describe a new species, and on average, a new species is discovered every week. We are in the golden age of paleontology. “We’re up to around fifteen hundred,” Brusatte told me by phone in August. About a third were found in the last decade, with some, like Yi qi in 2015, “going viral and then vanishing from the news cycle.” Yi qi was pigeon-sized; a single specimen was located in northern China. It had feathers, like many dinosaurs, but also fleshy wings, like a bat. “Are you sure Yi qi’s not a Pokémon?” I asked. “It would make an adorable Pokémon,” he said. “Very licensable.” Unfortunately, the reference echoes an insult that Brusatte and his discipline cannot forget: in 1988, the Noble Prize–winning physicist Luis Alvarez told a New York Times reporter that paleontologists were “more like stamp collectors” than “good scientists.” Brusatte laughed. “It’s not about finding them,” he said. “It’s about finding out. The more dinosaurs and other fossils we can study, the more we learn about what’s happened on Earth, and what might happen.” 

The story of dinosaurs fascinates most children—you probably think you remember the outline. The Mesozoic era saw the periods Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous. The first humble dinosaurs appeared approximately two hundred and forty million years ago, in the Late Triassic. Their ancestors were only as big as house cats. Pangea, meanwhile, had begun “to unzip down its middle,” as Brusatte writes. Continents “bleed lava” when they rend, and volcanoes resulted from the gnarliest of cracks, called fissure vents. Over the course of six hundred thousand years, in pulses, the rift zone threw up orange-red curtains “from hell.” Gases