The Therapods are still with us—they’re birds now.
Yep. If I had been independently wealthy ie a rich brat who didn’t have to worry about getting paid, I would have been a paleontologist.
But there have been a lot of major advancements in our knowledge of the ancient world recently. And formally acknowledging that birds are theropods and vice versa is just part of it.
What I find most interesting is that the end of the Permian ie the “Age of Reptiles” the dominant life forms were not reptiles but an ancient form of mammals that were warmblooded, lifebirths and had fur/hair that looked like this.
Then when the Permian extinction event happened (which we still don’t REALLY know what triggered it), it was essentially the most devastating of all extinction events with almost 99% of existing lifeforms getting killed off and all of the bigger mammals/therapsids died off except for a little Weasley/ratty looking guy that is our distant but direct ancestor the cynodont.
Mammals/therapsids didn’t become dominant again until after the Cretaceous event killed off the larger dinosaurs. Meanwhile, the only ancestors of modern reptiles and the dinosaurs/birds that survived whatever the terrible Permian extinction event was were also small. But in the following Triassic it wasn’t the birds/dinosaurs that reigned even though “they” always include the Triassic as part of the “Age of Dinosaurs”. The only dinosaurs/birds in the Triassic were tiny little guys with some primitive feathers like coelophysis.
Meanwhile the true dominant species in the Triassic were giant cousins of modern reptiles. They weren’t ancestors because like the majority of the therapsids/early mammals they died off during the Triassic extinction event and only small little reptiles survived to become modern crocodilians and other reptiles. But guys like Postosuchus here were the true terrors of the Triassic not the little dinosaurs/birds and they actually DO look like how the average person still thinks dinosaurs looked.
Even the big vegetarians in the Triassic were distant cousins of the modern reptiles OR like this Lisowicia, giant versions of the cynodont/early mammals.
But just like every major extinction event, the Triassic Extinction event killed off the large herbivorous mammals and the frightening giant meat-eating ancient reptiles and again the only survivors were the little guys like the early dinosaur/birds, the little rat and weaselike mammals that wouldn’t have been much different than cynodont and the small ancestors of the modern reptiles.
