Dinosaur Timeline

Introduction

The history of the planet Earth is divided into a bunch of time chunks so whether you’re looking at a time which existed 100 years ago or even as far back as 1000 million years ago you’ll need to learn the lingo used to classify each of these sizable time periods. The most important of these are aeons, eras and periods.

The rest of this article will go onto explain the timeline that the dinosaurs existed in so if you’re not familiar with the terms aeon, era and period we recommend you take a look at our timeline defintions page here, otherwise read on to learn more about the age of the dinosaurs.

The Age Of The Dinosaurs

The Dinosaurs and many of the other large prehistoric reptiles existed in the Mesozoic era of the Phanerozoic aeon. The Mesozoic era ran from about 250 million years ago to 65 million years ago. Thats 185 million years of Dinosaur domination, no wonder the Mesozoic era was commonly referred to as the age of the Dinosaurs.

The Mesozoic era contained three periods known as the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous periods. Over the next few sections we will try to cover the key charcterstics of each period to give you an overall understanding of when and where certain dinosaurs existed as well as smashing some of the common myths and misconceptions surrounding that time period.

The Triassic Period

The Triassic Period is the first phase of the Mesozoic era and spanned for an interval of 35 million years from 250-205 million years ago. Planet Earth was a very different place back then with the most common difference being that all the continents were united to form one huge c shaped land mass or super continent known as Pangaea meaning “all lands”.

More about the Triassic Period.
The Jurassic Period

The Jurassic Period was the second phase of the Mesozoic Era. The time scale for this famous period is from 205 to 138 MYA (million years ago). This period was named after the Jura Mountains because of the exposure and discovery of the marine lime stones.

More about the Jurassic Period.
The Cretaceous Period

The Cretaceous Period was the last period of the Mesozoic era and marked the end of the dinosaurs. It spanned a time from 138 million to about 65 MYA (million years ago). In this period the continents fully separated. However, Australia and Antarctica were still united.

There were important things that happened in this period such as the development of flowering plants like the magnolias and water lilies and the increase in the number of different kinds of insects. This was the beginning of the modern insects such as the ants, butterflies, grasshoppers, termites and aphids.

Source from :http://www.dinosaur-facts.com

For more information related to dinosaurs, visit rareresource.com.