The Dinosaurs of Wyoming - Wyoming State Geological Survey ...

Tragedy of the Mesozoic
All the elements of deep tragedy were present during the
closing stages of the Age of Reptiles. The ponderous dinosaurian
reptile, many feet long, and thousands of pounds in
weight, was a failure. Mother Nature had, through millions
of years, given the dinosaurs e\'ery chance to succeed in the
development of a race, ancestral to later, higher forms. Experiment
after experiment, yielding the curious and the bizarre,
had all failed. One by one dinosaur groups had appeared,
run their course, and disappeared in extinction. What
more is needed in a successful tragic drama than the powerful
pathos, inability of adjustment to changed environments, and
certain disastrous end? The dinosaurian reptile, here depicted,
was the last of his race, a sad hero of the Mesozoic.
Yet provident Nature had not been idle nor thoughtless,
for way back in the Triassic Period, when the dinosaurs began
their earthly course, the Mammals, derived from other reptiles,
also had their beginning. They \'vere dominated by
reptiles of sea, land and air throughout the Age of Reptiles,
and during the entire Mesozoic the Mammals remained small
and inconspicuous; many of them doubtless arboreal in the
Cretaceous days and living their lives remote from the dinosaurs.
Others, resem bling the rodents, lived in holes in the
ground, or in crevices among the rocks.
So at the close of the great Age of Reptiles-The Mesozoic
-the stage was set for a great tragedy, the extinction of th('
Dinosaurs! The Mammal (on the right), inconsiderable in
size, whether marsupial, multituberculate or just any Mesozoic
Mammal. specializing in brain power, stands ready tL
assume, unafraid, a leadership of untold possibilities, whic"h he
and his kind later maintained throughout tl:e Age of Mammals,
the Cenozoic. and still maintain in the Age of Man.