Steve Brusatte: Then something happened, the earth started to rumble a little bit. Robyn Williams: And then 252 million years ago, tell us, what then? ![]() And that's how the world stood 253 million years ago, right as the Permian period was about to come to an end and the whole history of life would be reset pretty quickly and very dramatically. Big predators, big plant eaters, things that were much bigger than cows, much bigger than giraffes. There were some of the antecedents of mammals, some of our distant ancestors, these big reptilian-looking proto-mammals, and some of these things are at the top of the food chain. There were lots of species of reptiles, there were lots of amphibians. But there was quite a lot of living things on the world then. It was quite hot and arid in the middle of that supercontinent, big deserts throughout. ![]() This was a time when all of the continents were smashed together into one, the supercontinent Pangaea stretched from the North Pole to the South Pole surrounded by a single global ocean. Steve Brusatte: This would have been right at the end of the Permian period, these were the last few seconds on the clock at the end of the Permian period. What was the planet like 253 million years ago? ![]() But let's start just before those terrible lizards first turned up. Steve Brusatte is a Professor of Palaeontology at the University of Edinburgh, and he has been finding fossils in China, Poland and in North America. Robyn Williams: The Science Show on RN, and so to the ancestors of those birds and the author of a book that has been in the top 10 of the London Times bestseller list for a long time, The Rise and Fall of Dinosaurs: The Untold Story of a Lost World.
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