Major Attraction In Museums: Dinosaurs

It's well known that dinosaurs were really big, some of them had feathers, and they all went extinct 65 million years ago after a giant meteor hit the planet Earth. But what don't you know? Here is a quick and easy overview of the most important highlights of what was happening in the Mesozoic Era.
Dinosaurs were not the First Reptiles to Rule the Earth
The first dinosaurs evolved during the middle to late Triassic period—about 230 million years ago—in the part of the supercontinent of Pangea that now corresponds with South America. Before the dinosaurs, the dominant land reptiles were archosaurs , therapsids (mammal-like reptiles), and pelycosaurs (typified by Dimetrodon). For 20 million or more years after dinosaurs developed, the most fearsome reptiles on Earth were ancient crocodiles. This was only at the beginning of the Jurassic period, 200 million years ago, that dinosaurs truly began their rise to their supremacy.
Dinosaurs Prospered for Over 150 Million Years
With our 100-year-max life spans, humans aren't well adapted to understanding "deep time," as geologists call it. To put certain things in perspective: Modern humans have only existed for only few hundred thousand years, and human civilization only got started about 10,000 years ago, mere blinks of the eye by Jurassic time scales. Everyone talks about how dramatically the dinosaurs went extinct from earth, but judging by the whopping 165 million years they managed to survive, they may have been the most successful vertebrate animals ever to colonize Earth.
Some Dinosaurs Were Warm-Blooded
Modern reptiles like turtles and crocodiles are cold-blooded, or "ectothermic," meaning they need to rely on the external environment to maintain their internal body temperatures. Modern mammals and birds are warm-blooded, or "endothermic," possessing active, heat-producing metabolisms that maintain constant internal body temperature, no matter the external conditions. There's a solid case to be made that at least some meat-eating dinosaurs—and even a few ornithopods—must have been endothermic since it's hard to imagine such an active lifestyle being fuelled by a cold-blooded metabolism. On the other hand, it's unlikely that giant dinosaurs like Argentinosaurus were used to be warm-blooded since they would have cooked themselves from the inside out in the matter of hours.

By: Saksham Gupta
Content: https://www.thoughtco.com/important-dinosaur-facts-1091959