Dinosaurs

DINOSAURS         Dinosaur is the name of large extinct reptiles of the Mesozoic Era, during which they were the dominant land animals on Earth. The term was proposed as a formal zoologic name in 1842 by the British anatomist Sir Richard Owen, in reference to large fossil bones unearthed in southern England. The various kinds of dinosaurs are classified in two formal categories, the orders Saurischia and Ornithischia, within the subclass Archosauria.         The first recorded dinosaur remains …

…apart and new mountain ranges were rising. Although none of these conditions is likely to have been solely responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs, collectively they may have been important.         Whatever the cause, the dinosaurs are now gone. In a way, however, they may remain. That is, many paleontologists consider birds almost certainly to have evolved from some small bipedal dinosaur during the Jurassic. If so, the children of the dinosaurs still exist today.