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The Permian–Triassic mass extinction, commonly called the Great Dying, occurred approximately 252 million years ago at the end of the Permian Period. It was the most severe known mass extinction in Earth’s history, eliminating an estimated 81–94% of marine species and causing profound losses among terrestrial vertebrates and other organisms. The crisis is strongly associated … Read more
Evidence status: assessed 3 September 2026. Taxonomic and stratigraphic interpretations reflect the cited literature; several remain actively debated. Introduction India preserves an important but uneven Jurassic dinosaur record. Its fossils document early sauropodomorphs, large early sauropods, probable armoured dinosaurs, and Middle Jurassic theropod and diplodocoid evidence. They also show why fossil interpretation requires restraint: the … Read more
Introduction India preserves an important record of the earliest stages of dinosaur evolution. Triassic dinosaur fossils from the Indian subcontinent are particularly significant because they document dinosaur diversification within Gondwana, when India was still part of the southern supercontinent and was geographically connected to other regions that now form separate continents. The Indian Triassic record … Read more
If you’ve ever watched a pigeon strut across a sidewalk with its head bobbing and its clawed feet gripping the pavement, you were looking at a dinosaur. Not a metaphorical one. Not a “descendant of” one, in some vague ancestral sense. A living, breathing member of the dinosaur family tree, classified that way by the … Read more
Introduction Imagine the last morning of the Cretaceous Period. Along the warm, shallow shores of what is now the Gulf of Mexico, a hadrosaur wades through reeds, pulling at vegetation. Pterosaurs wheel overhead. The sky is blue, the world is green, and the air is thick with the hum of insects. Nothing in the sensory … Read more
There are more types of dinosaurs alive today than there were during the Cretaceous Period. That statement sounds wrong — but it is scientifically accurate. Modern birds are dinosaurs in the full evolutionary sense, and with roughly 10,000 living bird species compared to an estimated 700–900 known non-avian dinosaur species in the fossil record, the … Read more