Zala’s Reviews > The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World > Status Update
Zala
is 78% done
“Pterosaurs were the first group of vertebrates (animals with backbones) to evolve wings and fly. Dinosaurs—in the guise of birds—were the second.”
yup, birds are dinosaurs and pterosaurs/pterodactyls are not
— Nov 16, 2025 06:55PM
yup, birds are dinosaurs and pterosaurs/pterodactyls are not
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Zala’s Previous Updates
Zala
is 96% done
”A comet or an asteroid—we aren’t sure which—collided with the Earth, hitting what is now the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico. It was about six miles (ten kilometers) wide, or about the size of Mount Everest.”
— 21 hours, 22 min ago
Zala
is 95% done
“Everything not rooted into the dirt was thrown upward; then it crashed down, and then up and down again, the Earth’s surface having turned into a trampoline.”
[…]
“Then the rains came. But what fell from the sky was not water. It was beads of glass and chunks of rock, each one scalding hot.”
[…]
“Forests spontaneously ignited and wildfires swept across the land.”
— 21 hours, 25 min ago
[…]
“Then the rains came. But what fell from the sky was not water. It was beads of glass and chunks of rock, each one scalding hot.”
[…]
“Forests spontaneously ignited and wildfires swept across the land.”
Zala
is 86% done
“We even know that both the typical sleeping posture of birds and the way in which they mine calcium from their bones for the shells of their eggs first arose in dinosaurs long before birds.”
— Nov 16, 2025 07:21PM
Zala
is 76% done
‘Later research showed that Nopcsa was correct, and his dwarf dinosaurs are now regarded as a prime example of the “island effect” in action.’
so pod’s travels was accurate
— Nov 15, 2025 07:38PM
so pod’s travels was accurate
Zala
is 65% done
“Most of these dinosaurs seemed to guard their nests and provide at least a bit of care for their young. Without some parental love, the baby dinosaurs would have been hopeless, because they were tiny: no dinosaur eggs that we know of are larger than a basketball, so even the mightiest species like T. rex would have been, at most, the size of a pigeon when they entered the world.”
— Nov 15, 2025 03:23PM
Zala
is 64% done
“The largest tyrannosaurs like T. rex had an [encephalization quotient] in the range of 2.0 to 2.4. By comparison, our EQ is about 7.5, dolphins come in around 4.0 to 4.5, chimps at about 2.2 to 2.5, dogs and cats are in the 1.0 to 1.2 range, and mice and rats languish around 0.5. Based on these numbers, we can say that Rex was roughly as smart as a chimp and more intelligent than dogs and cats.”
— Nov 15, 2025 03:20PM
Zala
is 58% done
“We increasingly believe that Rex didn’t go on the prowl alone; it traveled in packs.”
— Nov 15, 2025 03:06PM
Zala
is 56% done
“That’s the final piece of the puzzle, the last component in the tool kit that allowed T. rex to bite so strongly that it punctured, and then pulled through, the bones of its supper. Thick peg-like teeth, huge jaw muscles, and a rigidly constructed skull: that was the winning combination. Without any of these things, T. rex would have been a normal theropod, slicing and dicing its prey with care.”
— Nov 15, 2025 02:57PM
Zala
is 38% done
“Once so diverse in the Late Jurassic Morrison ecosystems, the long-necks suffered a crash in the Early Cretaceous. Almost all of the familiar species like and Brachiosaurus went extinct, while a new subgroup called the titanosaurs began to proliferate”
— Nov 15, 2025 12:35PM
Zala
is 29% done
“They were the largest animals that ever walked the land, and they push the limit for what evolution can achieve.
This raises a question that has fascinated paleontologists for over a century: how did sauropods become so large?
It’s one of the great puzzles of paleontology.”
— Nov 15, 2025 11:40AM
This raises a question that has fascinated paleontologists for over a century: how did sauropods become so large?
It’s one of the great puzzles of paleontology.”
