“If someone thinks that the riddle of the death of dinosaurs is a riddle for idle minds, then let him reflect on the words of one paleontologist:“The complete disappearance within one cosmic minute of a huge group of animals, and animals so widely endowed by nature and so numerous that they have dominated the Earth for more than a hundred million years, should serve as a warning to us, little people, who imagine themselves to be the eternal and only masters of the world. Sandro Otolenghi. Sahara, dinosaur cemetery.
Traces of giants
The fact that giants once lived on Earth, before whom any tall person seemed like a crumb, is said in the legends and myths of various peoples.
In the Irish sagas and tales of the Brothers Grimm, in the Bible and legends of the Indians of South America, we are talking about giants. Ancient Greek myths tell about the Titans, Arabian legends about the giants, including the immortal tales “One Thousand and One Nights”.
To match the giants - people once had animals on our planet. Giant snakes and winged dragons instilled terror in ordinary people. The heroes, endowed with exorbitant strength and gigantic growth, bravely fought with monsters and defeated them. And the proof that dragons and giants are not fiction were giant bones found in the lands of Europe and Asia, America and Africa.
In ancient China, “dragon bones” were traded for a long time. In the churches of medieval Europe, they showed the remains of people who “lived” before the Flood - these people, starting with Adam and Eve, supposedly reached 40-50 meters in height! In the tomb, which is located near the capital of Karakalpakia, the city of Nukus, the bones of a Muslim saint are kept to this day - next to them the tallest modern man seems to be a pygmy.
Gigantic people and animals left not only bones, but also footprints. The tracks are about a meter wide and more than a meter long! In Morocco, for example, gigantic footprints have long been known, which, according to legend, were left by a giant ostrich who served Saint Sidi Ali. In North America, in the state of Colorado, there are footprints, the length of which reaches 130 centimeters …
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Only at the beginning of the last century was the science of the ancient inhabitants of the Earth born - paleontology. Its creator was the French scientist J. Cuvier. He was the first to convincingly prove that the bones of people - giants, demonstrated as shrines, or the remains of people who lived before the flood, do not belong to the human race, but to animals that lived on the planet millions of years before people appeared.
Fairy dragons and monsters are a product of fantasy, but stories about them did not arise from scratch. The source of fantasy is the bones and traces of once real-life bogeymen, giant lizards.
In the 19th century, the scientific baptism of these lizards took place. At the suggestion of Richard Owen, they began to be called dinosaurs, which translated from Greek means "strong, terrible, heavy lizards." The term itself was not entirely successful. In addition to giant lizards, there were also small dinosaurs, the size of a horse, hare, or even a jerboa. But the term stuck and is used to this day. The remains of dinosaurs, their tracks and eggs are found in Mongolia and Australia, North America and South Africa, Central Asia and the south of England. The footprints of a dinosaur walking on two legs turned out to be the footprints of the legendary ostrich, which "served" the saint Sidi Ali. The dinosaur bones, revered as the remains of a saint, are kept in the tomb of Nukus. For almost two centuries, scientists from different countries of the world have been "hunting dinosaurs" looking for the remains of extinct dinosaurs,digging up and carefully restoring the appearance of animals that disappeared tens of millions of years ago.
About 210 million years ago, pseudo-suchies appeared on the planet, small lizards that moved on two legs; they were armed with teeth, which sat in separate cells on the jaws, and were decorated with several rows of bone plates stretching along the back. From these lizards or from their relatives, about 200 million years ago, lizard-like dinosaurs, first carnivorous and then herbivorous, originated.
In parallel with them, at about the same era, another order of ancient reptiles arose - ornithisch dinosaurs. They got this name because the belt of their hind limbs is extremely similar to that of a bird (although most ornithischian dinosaurs, like their ancestors, returned to walking on four legs).
Thus, on our planet, there were two independent orders of dinosaurs - lizard and ornithisch. Dinosaurs are sometimes called, following the original meaning of this word, and other giant reptiles that lived simultaneously with real dinosaurs, but not only on land, but in water - ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, mesosaurs. All these lizards were the rulers of the Earth for a whole era, which lasted 140-150 million years, the Mesozoic.
The Paleozoic, or the era of ancient life, is the name given to a time span of about 300 million years. 90 million years after its beginning, the first animals with skeletons, shells and shells appeared (before that, only skeletal creatures like sponges and bacteria lived in the waters of the oceans). In the middle of the Paleozoic, the first fish and plants appeared on land. At the end of the era of ancient life, reptiles became the masters of the planet.
At the turn of the last century, Professor V. P. Amalitsky conducted major excavations in the Northern Dvina area, in the Perm province. Their result was the discovery of many amphibians and reptiles. An entire period in the history of the Earth was called Permian - it lasted about 30 million years. At that time, the land was inhabited by scary-headed - deinocephals, lizards; their head, as large as one third of the body, was decorated with bizarre outgrowths located on the forehead, crown and sides of the muzzle. To match them - in size and grotesque appearance - were pareiasaurs, chubby lizards, which had a stocky body 3-4 meters long, kept on small outstretched legs, a small head covered with horny spines. These herbivores were hunted by predatory lizards. Crocodiles - titans, titanosuchs, armed with powerful teeth, were 4 meters long. Even more powerful teeth - up to 20 centimeters in length - had a beast-like lizard of foreigners (named so by V. P. Amalitsky in honor of his teacher, professor of St. Petersburg University A. A. Inostrantsev). The complete skeletons of the foreigners are more than 4 meters long, but judging by the individual bones, these dinosaurs could be twice as large.
It is possible to enumerate for a long time various extinct reptiles of the Permian period: Scutosaurus, a lizard the size of a bull, covered with armor of bone shields (the name "Scutosaurus" is translated into Russian as "Shield-bearing lizard"); dicynodont with a turtle's muzzle, powerful nape and upper canines; movement (named so by V. P. Amalitsky along the Northern Dvina River, where the find was made), whose skull resembles the skull of primitive mammals, etc. The reptiles, which in many ways resembled today's animals, were replaced by dinosaurs, who became the lords of land, air and water. Their appearance was no less bizarre than the appearance of the Permian lizardmen, and the size of the dinosaurs surpassed all the inhabitants of the land that ever existed on Earth.
When the plaster cast of the herbivorous dinosaur Diplodocus was delivered to St. Petersburg, it occupied the vast conference room of the Academy of Sciences, and in order to accommodate the 23-meter long monster, its tail had to be turned to one side - otherwise it would not fit. The Brontosaurus, the thunderous lizard, was not so long, but possessed a monstrously heavy body that weighed more than five elephants.
Triceratops, three-horned - this is how paleontologists called the amazing lizard, whose muzzle resembled a monstrous beak. The back of the head and neck of the Triceratops was protected by a dense bone shield, similar to a collar, the front legs of the lizard were shorter than the hind legs, a long tail dragged along the ground, and its head was decorated with two long, almost a meter, sharp horns sticking out above the eyes. The third horn, small, flaunted on the nose.
The stegosaurus had an even more bizarre appearance. Imagine a creature larger than an elephant, with a tiny head and a huge belly, with a rear overhanging the front of the body, with a back covered with huge triangular bony plates resembling leaves, with a powerful tail armed with sharp spines. The walnut-sized brain of a stegosaurus could not control all the movements of the colossal body. In the back of the body, the stegosaurus had a second brain that controlled the movement of the tail and lower limbs.
Diplodocus, brontosaurus, triceratops, and stegosaurus walked on four legs. But there were also bipedal dinosaurs, for example, iguanodons (their teeth are similar to those of an iguana lizard; living in the New World to this day). The height of the iguanodon reached 10 meters. The lizard had a bird's head, horny beak, light hollow bones and a powerful tail that helped it move on two hind legs. The front legs were short and small. At the beginning of the 60s of our century, in the south of England, the prints of 26 steps were found, left by the iguanodon 150 million years ago. These tracks are located strictly in a straight line, which means that the iguanodon was heading towards some goal. Moreover, the steps of the 10-meter-high lizard were surprisingly small - 30 centimeters long.
The iguanodon was a herbivorous lizard, like its four-legged cousins diplodocus, triceratops, stegosaurus. Carnivorous dinosaurs also moved on two legs, also reaching monstrous sizes.
Ceratosaurus, a horned lizard 6 m high, had powerful hind legs that allowed it to make long leaps, and sharp teeth. The predator Allosaurus was even larger, its height reached 10 meters. The hind limbs of the lizard were powerful, like those of the ceratosaurus, the front ones had three diverging fingers, ending in claws. But both Ceratosaurus and Allosaurus receded into the background before the predatory Deinodonts, the dire-toothed dinosaurs, the largest known land-based carnivores that have ever existed on Earth.
Tyrannosaurus - rex, lizard tyrant - king - this is how paleontologists call a reptile that had teeth 30 centimeters long, three-toed, bird-like paws with curved sharp claws, a huge mouth, powerful hind legs, front limbs, which were transformed into tiny two-toed paws and 14 about six in height with a brain weighing 0.5 kilograms, that is, like a newborn!
Tyrannosaurus rex was considered the largest predator of the planet … until Soviet scientists found in the Gobi Desert the remains of an even stronger and larger lizard, Tarbosaurus, which surpassed its counterpart, Tyrannosaurus rex, in teeth size, length and height. Of course, such huge predators were matched by their prey, herbivorous lizards, the mass of which was tons and even tens of tons.
Dinosaurs have taken over land. But their expansion was not limited to this. They conquered the air by learning to fly. The first living beings appeared in the water, then mastered the land. Living beings began to conquer the air space a long time ago, more than 300 million years ago. The first winged creatures were insects. The wingspan of the giant dragonflies reached almost a meter! And in the era of lizards, the Mesozoic, they began to master the air and reptiles.
And today there are "flying dragons", lizards with folds of skin on the sides of the body, like wings. They live in Southeast Asia. “This lovely creature does not reach more than 21 cm in total length,” writes Brem. - No description can give an idea of its beauty. The head of a living dragon is metallic-brown and decorated with a black spot between the eyes; the back and inner half of the flying membrane are colored with a mixture of dark brown and pink-red and have a metallic sheen; in some specimens, the color changes in transverse stripes, on which there are many black spots and short irregular lines."
In the Mesozoic era, thousands and thousands of generations of reptiles changed, before those born to crawl did not learn to fly. “Probably, at first, these were small lizards who had to live in trees to escape from large predatory lizards. Here they jumped, rushing from tree to tree for prey. Of course, only the best gymnasts, the fastest jumpers, survived. In their descendants, the scales on the skin disappeared, the bones became hollow, so that the mass of the animal became smaller. A fold of skin became a huge flap running from the little toes of the forelegs to the hind legs. The airfoil was thus attached to the fingers of these lizards; that's why they are called finger-winged lizards - pterodactyls “- this is how the American paleontologist Maxwell Reed reconstructs the long and painful process of transformation of animals called reptiles,in winged lizards - pterodaktels. The sizes of these winged reptiles varied. There are known pterodactyls the size of a sparrow, prints of flying dinosaurs have come down to us, in comparison with which the largest birds of the planet of our days seem to be dwarfs. The wingspan of a pteranodon, a winged dinosaur that lived 70-100 million years ago, reached 7 meters!
The land and air became subject to the dinosaurs. The conquest of the element of water, these lizards began even earlier than the conquest of the air. And here, in the seas, rivers and lakes, reptiles in the Mesozoic had to withstand a harsh struggle with competitors. For the water element, the cradle of life, was inhabited for many millions of years before dinosaurs by fishes of monstrous size, squid and crustaceans. It is not surprising that the lizards also acquired terrible teeth, amazing mobility, enormous size, having migrated from land, which was mastered by their ancestors amphibians who came out of the water, again into the element of water.
Semi-aquatic, semi-terrestrial lifestyle was led by the largest animals that ever inhabited land. We have already talked about the brontosaurus, which weighed as much as half a dozen elephants, and the diplodocus, the length of which is difficult to imagine (imagine that you need to measure three dozen steps before reaching from the head of the diplodocus to the end of its tail!). But neither brontosaurs nor diplodocus were the largest animals to walk on Earth. The record belongs to the so-called platypus dinosaurs.
"The name of these pangolins, - writes about duck-billed dinosaurs I. A. Efremov, - arose from the fact that their muzzles were flattened and expanded. Covered with a horny sheath, they looked very much like a duck's beak. A huge number of teeth - five hundred in each jaw - in these animals merged together, forming in the upper and lower jaws four long and thick ridges with pointed enamel edges. The jaws of the duck-billed dinosaurs thus turned into a very strong chopper or straw chopper and could provide the giant animal with the right amount of crushed plant mass. Spare teeth, growing all the time from the bottom, from the inside, replaced the worn ones. This became necessary because the abrasion from the plants trapped along with the sand and silt was very strong. Platypus dinosaurs, or trakhodonts, walked on their hind legs, but only in water. A weak pelvis, which does not correspond to the extreme massiveness of the bones of the hind legs, indicates that the animal could not move on land in an upright position. Trakhodonts walked along the bottom of deep ducts, maintaining balance with the help of strong forepaws, equipped with swimming membranes and adapted for rowing."
The water element not only allowed the giant lizards to move their bodies of many tons, but also served them as good protection from the terrible predators prowling on land. But their predators also lived in this element. Only their victims were not diplodocus or brontosaurs, but other inhabitants of the waters, primarily fish. Relocation to the water required adaptation from the lizards - the transformation of paws that walked on the ground into flippers and fins (tens of millions of years before that, fins, on the contrary, turned into legs and paws in the ancestors of reptiles and amphibians).
Ichthyosaurs, a fish lizard, had a fish tail, a dolphin's face, crocodile teeth, and whale fins. The plesiosaur had an even more bizarre appearance - imagine a snake that was passed through the body of a turtle and equipped with fins! The sizes of the plesiosaurs were different - from half a meter to 15 meters.
According to the “father of paleontology” J. Cuvier, the epithet “monster” is most suitable for plesiosaurs. The body of plesiosaurs, called elasmosaurs (long-necked lizards), had a particularly bizarre shape. With a total length of 13 meters, this animal had an eight-meter neck with a record number of vertebrae (if sloths and sirens have 6-9 of them, all other mammals, including humans and giraffes, have only seven, then Elasmosaurus had 76!). The barrel-shaped turtle body did not allow the plesiosaurs to move quickly, and they probably overtook their victims by making a swift head toss on their long neck.
“In the vast expanse of the ancient sea, a huge figure like a snake was visible above the surface, which either stood up from the water and straightened its head, then plunged into the water and disappeared, leaving foam on the surface. This unusual neck was connected to the body no less than an elephant - this is how the famous American paleontologist of the last century E. Cope describes the elasmosaurus. "He often swam many pounds underwater, exposing his head to breathe, and then lowering it down and sweeping 40 pounds deeper without changing his body position."
Pliosaurs were close relatives of plesiosaurs. The neck of these sea lizards was shorter than the head. Unlike the teeth of other animals, the triangular teeth of pliosaurs, which reached 30 centimeters in length and 6 centimeters in diameter, did not join when the mouth was slammed during the capture of prey. The teeth of the upper jaw of the pliosaur were included in the intervals of the similar teeth of the lower jaw. The power of pliosaurs is indicated by such data; with a head of three meters, a fifteen-meter pliosaur had almost two-meter jaws! “In terms of body shape, pliosaurs are closer to ichthyosaurs, although they did not achieve their perfection in swimming,” writes Professor V. Ochev in his article “What the lizard from the Cretaceous sea made think about”. - In all likelihood, pliosaurs, like sea lions, were actively maneuverable animals, chasing prey. These powerful predators ate large animalsnot disdaining their long-necked relatives, that is, plesiosaurs) and in the stomach of one plesiosaur bones belonging to a pteradaktel were found, which means that long-necked lizards, inhabitants of the waters, could also hunt flying prey).
But, perhaps, the most terrible lizards - predators that lived in the waters, were the mesosaurs. In the mountains of the American state of Kansas, the remains of thousands of mesosaurs were found - snake-like lizards that swam, quickly wriggling in the water and helping to move with powerful fins, and swallowing prey with a mouth that could stretch like snakes. What size of prey a Mesosaurus could swallow is not hard to imagine: the length of the snake jashers reached 15 meters or more!
Land, sea and air belonged to huge lizards … Why did the domination of dinosaurs end and were replaced by new masters of the planet - mammals, which include its present ruler, Homo sapiens, Homo sapiens? The riddle of the death of dinosaurs is rightly considered the number one riddle for paleontology.