What animal dominated the Jurassic period?

Answer 1

The Archosaurs were considered the dominant land animals of the Jurassic Period. These include all non-avian dinosaurs, crocodilians, and pterosaurs. It is generally believed that their modern descendants are modern birds and crocodiles, alligators, caimans, and gharials.

Answer 2

I looked this up for you. I hope it helps. I love studying the Jurassic and the Cretaceous periods.

Ten misconceptions about dinosaurs-

· Dinosaurs represent failure and extinction.

o Rather, dinosaurs are the best examples of success and adaptation. They ruled the Earth longer than any other land animals (over 150 million years), and gave rise to birds.

· Dinosaurs and "humans" coexisted

o The death of the last dinosaur and the appearance of the first "human" (genus Homo) were separated by about 62 million years.

· Dinosaurs were either all hot-blooded or all cold-blooded.

o Mesozoic dinosaurs were not "warm-blooded" like modern mammals, nor were they "cold-blooded" like modern lizards. Most specialists believe that dinosaurs were "dinosaur-blooded", a condition that combines certain aspects of "warm-bloodedness" with a changing metabolism over the animal's lifetime.

· The word dinosaur means "terrible-lizard."

o Actually it was originally defined to mean "fearfully-great lizard", by Richard Owen in 1842. The Greek word "deinos", when used as a superlative, means "fearfully-great" (as used by Homer in The Iliad). It became simplified over time, as a simple adjective, to mean "terrible". Dinosaurs are neither terrible nor are they lizards!

· Whatever you read in the latest "dinosaur book" or see on T.V. or in the movies must be true.

o Popular books, movies, and TV specials need not be 100% accurate. They often contain errors and outdated information, and may reflect the personal bias of the writer. (Most dinosaur books and TV scripts are not reviewed by professional dinosaur paleontologists).

· Dinosaurs all lived and died at the same time.

o The distance in time between Tyrannosaurus and Apatosaurus (formerly called Brontosaurus) is more than the time between Tyrannosaurus and your parents, about 65 million years. Of the (approximately) 900 named species of Mesozoic dinosaurs, only two or three dozen species faced the final extinction in North America.

· Mammals arose after the dinosaurs, or helped drive them into extinction by eating their eggs.

o Mammals and dinosaurs both appeared in the Late Triassic Period. There is no evidence that dinosaurs went extinct because of predation on their eggs.

· An asteroid (or comet) killed the dinosaurs.

o The controversy over the cause of the dinosaur extinction continues among paleontologists. However, evidence from a deep sea core drilled off the coast of Florida proves that an asteroid hit the Earth at the end of the Cretaceous which caused the dinosaur extinction. Most dinosaur specialists are willing to accept that an asteroid hit the Earth, but some do not think that it was the sole cause of the Mesozoic extinctions. Instead, they claim that dinosaurian diversity was already in decline by the end of the Cretaceous. The asteroid impact may have been "the straw that broke the camel's back."

· All big reptiles from the prehistoric past ("Monsters") are dinosaurs.

o Dinosaurs represented less than 10% of the 40 groups of reptiles from the Mesozoic Era (Pterodactyls, sea-serpents, giant lizards, pelycosaurs, and other big prehistoric beasts are not dinosaurs). "Monsters" and Dragons are the products of fiction and mythology.

· Archaeologists dig up dinosaurs.

o Archaeology and paleoanthropology (subdivisions of Anthropology) only deal with humans and cover the last 3-4 million years. Paleontology (a combination of Geology and Biology) deals with all fossils and covers the last 3.5 billion years!

At the end of the summer of 2001, Jack Horner, Curator of Paleontology at the Museum of the Rockies, and Nathan Myhrvold, a Microsoft executive and dinosaur enthusiast, discovered the tip of a tooth sticking out of a small hillside just as they were closing their camp. A quick excavation revealed a tooth and leg bones of a Tyrannosaurus rex, the famous carnivorous dinosaur that lived in the Late Cretaceous of North America.

From July 18 to August 1, 2003, Dr. Matthew Carrano led a small reconnaissance expedition to the Late Jurassic deposits of south-central Wyoming. This area is famous for housing some of the most productive dinosaur sites in the world, most notably Como Bluff. Most of these sites come from the Brushy Basin Member of the Morrison Formation, which has produced such familiar dinosaurs as Apatosaurus, Brachiosaurus, Diplodocus, Stegosaurus, Allosaurus, Ceratosaurus, and Camptosaurus.

Dr. Matthew Carrano returned to Wyoming from June 13-28, 2004. This expedition was a follow-up to his first reconnaissance trip of summer, 2003. During these 2-1/2 weeks, Dr. Carrano continued exploring the Late Jurassic deposits of the Morrison Formation, as well as those of the overlying Early Cretaceous Cloverly Formation.

These two formations are well-known to dinosaur paleontologists. The Morrison is incredibly productive, famous for giant sauropods such as Brachiosaurus and Apatosaurus, along with evocative predatory theropods such as Allosaurus. The Cloverly has yielded the sickle-clawed dromaeosaur Deinonychus, as well as the common herbivorous ornithopod Tenontosaurus.