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Informationen zum Autor Megan Stine; Illustrated by Gregory Copeland Klappentext Travel back to the time when the mighty dinosaurs ruled the earth. The Age of Dinosaurs began about 250 million years ago. In the beginning they were quite small but over time they evolved into the varied and fascinating creatures that captivate our imaginations today. What we know about dinosaurs is evolving, too! We've learned that some dinosaurs were good parents, that dinosaurs could grow new teeth when old ones fell out, and that most dinosaurs walked on two legs. We've even discovered that birds are modern relatives of dinosaurs! What Was the Age of the Dinosaurs? In 1822, a young country doctor named Gideon Mantell was living in Sussex, England. He delivered babies and treated people with serious diseases. But Mantell had another passion as well. Ever since childhood, he had loved to collect fossils—the ancient remains of dead plants and animals. Whenever he could, the busy doctor spent time digging near the chalky cliffs of England’s coastline. At first what he dug up were small pieces of fossil bones. But as time went on, he began to find some big bones—really big ones. The bones were too big to belong to any known animal. Even elephant bones would have been smaller. Then one day, Mantell’s wife, Mary, found a few enormous fossil teeth. She brought them to her husband. What were they? What kind of animal could possibly have teeth as big as this? Mantell wasn’t sure what to think. He talked to other scientists. No one could agree about what they were. A man named William Buckland had once been given some huge bones. He studied them for six years and finally decided they belonged to a giant lizard no one had ever seen before. Buckland called it Megalosaurus (say: MEG-uh-lo-SORE-us), which means “big lizard.” Mantell asked Buckland about the huge teeth he had found. But Buckland didn’t think they had come from a creature similar to his Megalosaurus . He said they came from a fish! After that, Mantell went to a museum and looked at other fossils and animal skeletons on display. The teeth he had found looked exactly like iguana teeth—only many times larger. If they came from an iguana, it would have to have been at least sixty feet long! That’s as long as a house! Suddenly Mantell realized something exciting. Like Buckland, he had discovered a new kind of animal no one knew about. He decided to call it Iguanodon (ig-WAN-uh-don). Neither Mantell nor Buckland understood that they had stumbled onto a completely unknown group of animals. The word dinosaur hadn’t been invented yet—and wouldn’t be for another twenty years. But that’s what Megalosaurus and Iguanodon were. In the early nineteenth century, no one yet realized that in prehistoric times, gigantic animals had roamed the earth. But soon, more fossils were found, and slowly scientists began to put together the pieces of a long-lost world—the Age of the Dinosaurs. Chapter 1 : The Prehistoric World Two hundred thirty million years ago, the Age of the Dinosaurs began. The first baby dinosaurs poked their heads out of their eggshells and looked around for something to eat. The earth was a very different place then. North America didn’t exist. Neither did Africa or Europe. All seven continents we know today were clumped together into one huge landmass that we call Pangaea (pan-JEE-uh). Pangaea was surrounded on all sides by water. The center of the huge continent was a hot desert, where not much could survive. A giant ocean covered the rest of the earth. Near the coastlines, the ocean cooled the air. Cool air and water made it possible for fabulous life-forms to develop. Ferns grew along the coast. Moss covered the rocks. There were forests of pine tre...
