S A U R I C H T H Y S
The Triassic Period began roughly 250 million years ago,
amidst the ruin left by the mass extinction that occurred
at the end of the Permian. Most of this planet's species
gone forever. Others survived. Their offspring, born into
a chaos that lasted the next few million years, the time
it took for life on Earth to recover.
M A S T O D O N T O S A U R U S
The world's biggest amphibian of all time.
A two ton salamander just crawled out of your lake.
The animal was aquatic, living its life mostly submerged.
What's the tip off? We've got a four thousand pound
pickled piece of luggage being paddled up an incline,
on four puny legs. It's a squirmy snail's pace, at best.
Nonetheless, the animal was a hall of famer of its day.
Our mastodon had a fishlike lateral line system,
sensitive to vibration and water pressure changes.
This enabled the animal to stalk its prey even in
the murkiest of waters.
T R I A D O B A T R A C H U S
Madagascar, 250 million years ago.
Here is our ancestor to the frog.
A diamond in the rough.
It has that flat, broad frog head.
The hind legs have that unique frog stance.
The forearms are ready to buffer a hard landing.
But you're not going to get an explosive spring
from these sadly undersized legs.
And the torso is too big. It's a salamander
with fourteen vertebrae versus as few as
four in the modern, compact frog.
The Triassic frog is still a generic.
Its simple philosophy:
stay hydrated.
L Y S T R O S A U R U S
Plant eater. Mammal-like reptile. Resilient.
Survivor of the Permian mass extinction.
The legs sprawl like most any primitive vertebrate.
The Triassic climate can be both extreme and
volatile. This animal burrows to escape the heat.
It has barrel-chested lung capacity in order
to survive low oxygen situations.
The environment was high mortality.
The favored biological response to this
adversity it to grow up fast and breed early.
There are no individual star performances here.
Its a numbers game with this population.
Make sure you've punched your ticket before
you leave.
C Y N O G N A T H U S
The Middle Triassic apex predator. Wolf size.
Does that skull not remind you of a mammal?
Here is our first look at a future dog or lion's head.
Get a load of those legs. Nearly directly under
the body. Built for speed and power.
Fossil hunters have found this animal's identical
remains in both South Africa and South America.
They were the identical terrestrial species and
yet they were separated by three thousand miles
of the Atlantic. Continental drift supplied the
explanation.
The Earth's crust is not static.
The continents sit atop large plates that collide,
reform and intermingle over the hundreds of
millions of years, a process normally too slow
for us to take notice. Mount Everest grows
about an inch higher every year because
India is slowly colliding into Asia.
Come on. Who would believe that?
D I A D E M O D O N
This guy is about our oldest ancestral mammal,
the stepping stone separating reptiles from mammals.
It eats most anything edible. Your dental work
comes with incisors, a pair of canines, and now with
premolars for slicing and crushing. And they fit
perfectly when you close your mouth. With
the needle teeth of reptiles it is sometimes
hit or miss whether you can close your mouth,
at all. Imagine. Now you can chew the toughest
plants or crunch the biggest bone, thanks to your
massive, powerful jaws and dentures.
The Diademodon comes complete with an opposing
first digit for better grasping, a highly sensitized nose
and a sophisticated middle ear for excellent hearing.
The animal is the first step in moving from primitive
reptile into the path towards becoming a mammal.
Still, the success of this mammalian progress
was pushed from center stage by an even
bigger story - the dramatic rise of the reptile.
The Triassic would launch entire new branches
of animals into extravagant variations.
It would be a time of behemoths and powered
flight. Cunning would become a predator's tool.
Here would be the introduction into the
Age of Dinosaurs.
* * * * *
OVER EASY
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