Guest Author – James Ormiston
Bristol Palaeontology MSci Graduate / PalaeoArtist
The road to flight is littered with the snapped airframes, tangled control lines, burnt out engines, and the torn wing fabric of countless victims to gravity’s crushing hand. For every successful attempt by humanity to get a face-full of cloud, there are scores of attempts met with a face-full of mud, grass, tarmac, water, the list goes on.
Today is the 5th November, the annual British holiday of blowing things up to celebrate things not being blown up. Seeing as it is such a flashy vibrant event, I’m turning my attention to what is perceived as one of the flashiest and showiest of the dinosaurs; a star of Jurassic Park, Dilophosaurus.
Everyone knows about the great extinction at the end of the dinosaur age, but it was far from smooth sailing up until then. The Mesozoic era stretches out 180 million years, during which time many different groups of animals exploded into abundance and then died away. Even without anything so dramatic as an asteroid impact much of these were still significant catastrophes. One such time is the Toarcian Oceanic Anoxic Event (T-OAE). (more…)
