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Famous Steve Brusatte Quotes

“The initial eruptions in Morocco released clouds of carbon dioxide, a powerful greenhouse gas, which rapidly warmed the planet. It got so hot that strange ice formations buried within the seafloor, called clathrates, melted in unison all throughout the world’s oceans. Clathrates are unlike the solid blocks of ice we’re used to, the ones we put in our drinks or carve into fancy sculptures at parties. They are a more porous substance, a latticework of frozen water molecules that can trap other substances inside it. One of those substances is methane, a gas that seeps up constantly from the deep Earth and infiltrates the oceans but is caged in the clathrates before it can leak into the atmosphere. Methane is nasty: it’s an even more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, packing an earth-warming punch over thirty-five times as great. So when that first torrent of volcanic carbon dioxide increased global temperatures and melted the clathrates, all of that once-trapped methane was suddenly released. This initiated a runaway train of global warming. The amount of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere approximately tripled within a few tens of thousands of years, and temperatures increased by 3 or 4 degrees Celsius.”

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Book:The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World
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“Many a dinosaur was probably swept away by floodwaters or entombed by mud avalanches. But the megamonsoons also had another effect. They helped divide Pangea into environmental provinces, characterized by different amounts of precipitation, varying severity of the monsoonal winds, and different temperatures. The equatorial region was extremely hot and humid, a tropical hell that would make summer in today’s Amazon seem a trip to Santa’s workshop by comparison. Then there were vast stretches of desert, extending about 30 degrees of latitude on either side of the equator—like the Sahara, only covering a much broader swath of the planet. Temperatures here were well into the hundreds (over 35 degrees Celsius), probably all year long, and the monsoonal rains that pounded other parts of Pangea were absent here, offering little more than a trickle of precipitation. But the monsoons exerted a great impact in the midlatitudes. These areas were slightly cooler but much more wet and humid than the deserts, far more hospitable to life. Herrerasaurus, Eoraptor, and the other Ischigualasto dinosaurs lived in such a setting, smack in the middle of the midlatitude humid belt of southern Pangea.”

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Book:The Age of Dinosaurs: The Rise and Fall of the World’s Most Remarkable Animals
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“Pangea may have been a united landmass, but its treacherous weather and extreme climates gave it a dangerous unpredictability. It wouldn’t have been a particularly safe or pleasant place to call home. But the very first dinosaurs had no choice. They entered a world still recovering from the terrible mass extinction at the end of the Permian, a land subject to the violent whims of storms and the blight of blistering temperatures. So did many other new types of plants and animals that were getting their start after the mass extinction cleared the planet. All of these newbies were thrust onto an evolutionary battlefield. It was far from certain that dinosaurs were going to emerge triumphant. After all, they were small and meek creatures, nowhere near the top of the food chain during their earliest years. They were hanging around with lots of other species of small-to-midsize reptiles, early mammals, and amphibians in the middle of the food pyramid, fearful of the crocodile-line archosaurs, who held the throne. Nothing was handed to the dinosaurs. They were going to have to earn it.”

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Book:The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World
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“After some of the largest volcanic eruptions in Earth history desecrated ecosystems, dinosaurs became more diverse, more abundant, and larger. Completely new dinosaur species were evolving and spreading into new environments, while other groups of animals went extinct. As the world was going to hell, dinosaurs were thriving, somehow taking advantage of the chaos around them.”

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Book:The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World
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