Dan Gutman - My Weird School Fast Facts: Dinosaurs, Dodos, and Woolly Mammoths

Contents

Contents

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Okay, lets get down to business here. The first thing everybody needs to know about dinosaur poop is that

Arlo! We agreed that were not going to talk about inappropriate subjects like that!

Oh yeah, I forgot. So what is this chapter about?

Well, I thought we should start off by talking about when and where the dinosaurs lived.

Thats obvious. Tyrannosaurus rex was a giant killing machine with twelve-inch-long sharp teeth, and it could run up to twenty-five miles an hour. So it could live anywhere it wanted! And if some other dinosaur was living in that place, it would have to leave or T. rex would chase it down the street and bite its head off.

They didnt even have streets back then, Arlo! It was millions of years ago. To be specific, it was between about 252 and 66 million years ago. This was called the Mesozoic era. It means time of the middle animals.

I knew that. I was just yanking your chain. But do you know why the Mesozoic era was like a hockey game?

I give up. How could the Mesozoic era be anything like a hockey game?

Both of them are divided into three periods! Ha! The Mesozoic era was made up of the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous periods.

Wow! Im impressed, Arlo! I thought you only knew about things like dinosaur poop.

I do! In fact, I doo doo. Would you like to hear some fast facts about dinosaur poop?

No! Lets talk about the Triassic period. That was 250 to 200 million years ago.

Ah yes, the good old days. I think my grandpa Bert was alive back then.

He was not! Back then, all the continents on Earth were part of one giant landmass thats called Pangaea. So Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia, Antarctica, and the Americas were all sort of stuck together, like a big piece of peanut brittle.

If all the land was one continent, the animals and plants living there were probably pretty much the same, right?

Right. And there were no polar ice caps. It was mostly hot and dry. Deserts covered a lot of the land. So the first dinosaurs to appear were like our current reptiles that can survive in hot climates.

Yeah, but toward the end of the Triassic period, stuff got interesting. There were giant earthquakes. Huge volcanoes erupted. Boom! Crash! Rock the world!

The peanut brittle, I mean Pangaea, broke into two halves, and they started to drift away from each other. The Atlantic Ocean was born.

Wow, watching a supercontinent slide away must have been crazy! And the dinosaurs got to see it live and in person.

Well, they got to see it before they died. There was a mass extinction at that time. I think it was sad that so many animals of the Triassic period died, dont you?

If you ask me, it would be a lot sadder if they were still around. I dont want some T. rex chasing me down the street trying to bite my head off.