About 200 million years ago, a pair of Plateosaurus fill up on a stand of Araucaria, the trees we would later, much later, call 'Monkey-Puzzle' trees
At this point in prehistory, the entire land-surface of Earth is consolidated into a single super-continent, now known as Pangaea, although Pangaea has begun the long process of splitting in two. Much of the vast interior of the supercontinent has been a desert for 50 million years, although the climate is now finally changing. The global catastophe known as the Permian extinction had decimated life on Earth about 30 million years earlier, bringing the curtain down on the Paleozoic era with a bang. The few lifeforms which survived found an entire new world open to them - and the reptiles which survived into this new Mesozoic era exploded into new niches, many of them becoming - something else altogether... Some reptiles took to the air and became pterosaurs; others adapted to life in the oceans and became fish-like ichthyosaurs. One of these 'something-else' experiments had resulted in a highly-successful new body-type, held high off the ground by new types of hip joints and limbs, in an active creature that could exploit many of these new terrestrial niches - the dinosaurs. As animals and plants invaded the Earth's surface during the Paleozoic, there had been a constant arms race between plants and the animals which fed on them. Up until now, the plants had the upper hand, in the form of trees - the first 'modern' trees, the conifers, had appeared earlier in the Permian. The largest animals in the Paleozoic had all been rather squat quadrupeds, so a tree was safe from predation once it grew above a certain height, a relatively-modest 2 meters or so... Towards the end of the Triassic, the first period of the Mesozoic, the upstart dinosaurs changed that balance of power, first by lifting their bodies higher off the ground than their predecessors, and then by developing longer necks which could reach even higher. Some types even compounded the assault by becoming even more massive than the earlier squat reptiles had been! These groups became the prosauropods (such as the Plateosaurus shown here) and their relatives and eventual replacements, the giant sauropods, largest animals ever to walk the earth! Trees were no longer safe from predation...
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