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Did a million years of rain jump-start dinosaur evolution?

An extended bout of warm wet weather 232 million years ago may have profoundly altered life on Earth.
  1. Michael Marshall

    1. Michael Marshall is a science journalist in Devon, UK.

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Alastair Ruffell could see there was something odd about the rocks near his childhood home in Somerset, UK. The deposits hail from the Triassic period, more than 200 million years ago, and most are a dull orange-red, signifying that they formed when the region was a parched landscape, baked by the sun. Nothing strange there. But outcrops on Somerset’s Lipe Hill have a thin stripe of grey running through the heart of the red stone. That band signals a time when arid desert disappeared and the region transformed into a swampy wetland. For some reason, an incredibly dry climate had turned wet, and stayed that way for more than a million years.

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Nature 576, 26-28 (2019)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-03699-7

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