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Despite their cultural influence, the grand narrative of the dinosaur story is rarely told. Most of us have heard of Stegosaurus and Tyrannosaurus, for example, but these two dinosaurs lived more than eighty million years apart—a greater span of time than the entire post–T. rex history of the planet. Furthermore, we often know even less about the environments these animals lived in—the other animals and plants inhabiting a dramatic changing Earth alongside the dinosaurs.

The Shortest History of the Dinosaurs tells the full story, a 230-million-year epic of small beginnings, spectacular golden periods, and eventual global domination—before an unthinkable asteroid event brought everything to a screeching halt, covering the major moments in evolution, extinction, and ecology. We learn that, for millions of years in the Triassic, dinosaurs were dog-sized—but slowly developing evolutionary traits like feathers and warm-bloodedness that would set them up for future success. In the Jurassic Period, these traits—and others like laying eggs and growing specialized air sacs—led to an era of rapid growth in dinosaur population and physical size. As Pangea continued to break apart, during the Cretaceous Period, dinosaurs traversed the globe, adapting to air and water—before a six-mile-wide asteroid hit Central America and brought the age of dinosaurs to a fiery end.

Using countless recent fossil discoveries, fresh understandings of genetics and evolution, and over fifty illustrations and maps, author Riley Black reveals the startling relationships dinosaurs shared with each other, the land they lived on, other animal species, and the earth as a whole.