This is 250 million years ago, yes. And at this time the world was very different to the world we see to day. All the continents were connected a so there was the continent pangier. This was a much hotter world, and there was probably a sort of large deserts going through parts of the middle parts of the continent. There existedas i understand, at about the same time as the dinosaurs. Is that right? And if so, what was the relationship between the two? They both appeared around the same time. So they were probably living in similar environments. Perhaps some of these crocks were actually feeding on some of these dinosaurs. What brought the triotic period to an
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the remarkable diversity of the animals that dominated life on land in the Triassic, before the rise of the dinosaurs in the Jurassic, and whose descendants are often described wrongly as 'living fossils'. For tens of millions of years, the ancestors of alligators and Nile crocodiles included some as large as a bus, some running on two legs like a T Rex and some that lived like whales. They survived and rebounded from a series of extinction events but, while the range of habitats of the dinosaur descendants such as birds covers much of the globe, those of the crocodiles have contracted, even if the animals themselves continue to evolve today as quickly as they ever have.
With
Anjali Goswami
Research Leader in Life Sciences and Dean of Postgraduate Education at the Natural History Museum
Philip Mannion
Lecturer in the Department of Earth Sciences at University College London
And
Steve Brusatte
Professor of Palaeontology and Evolution at the University of Edinburgh
Producer Simon Tillotson