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Article: Footprints in the muds of time; The rise of the dinosaurs.(Brief Article)
- Article from:
- The Economist (US)
- Article date:
- May 18, 2002
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2002 Economist Newspaper Ltd. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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The dinosaurs may have risen to power in as little as 10,000 years
EVERYBODY knows that the dinosaurs were killed by an asteroid. Something big hit the earth 65m years ago and, when the dust had fallen, so had the great reptiles. There is thus a nice, if ironic, symmetry in the idea that a similar impact brought about the dinosaurs' rise. That is the thesis proposed by Paul Olsen, of Columbia University, and his colleagues in this week's Science.
Dinosaurs first appear in the fossil record 230m years ago, during the Triassic period. But they were mostly small, and they shared the earth with lots of other sorts of reptile. It was in the subsequent ...