Jurassic DinosaursJurassic Dinosaurs  Courtesy of Tourism Queensland During the Jurassic period, the supercontinent Pangaea started to break up. So while during the Triassic all the dinosaus lived on the same continent, now they became isolated from each other, which created new species, different on every isolated continent. In the early Jurassic Period, the skies were inhabited by pterosaurs and the seas were inhabited by Ichthyosaurs (which now had much more of a dolphin-like shape than during Triassic), Plesiosaurs, crocodiles and turtles. On the land, the coelophysid meat-eaters were the main predators, although a variety of other carnivores started to evolve as the life began to diversify. Of the lizard-hipped plants eaters, a few late prosauropods still existed, but the primitive sauropods now became prominent. The bird-hipped plant-eaters were still in their early evolution. The early Ornithopods were small, and armoured dinosaurs only started to evolve. In the mid-Jurassic Period, the carnivorous Theropods were widespread and ranged from small animals to large monsters. The most primitive sauropods - cetiosaurs - had evolved, and along with them lived the more "modern", bird-hipped dinosaurs such as Ornithopods and armoured dinasours. Ornithopods were not very abundant, their time was yet tom come. Armoured dinosaurs - Thyreophorans - heavy, four-footed animals with plates or spikes on their back and tails - started to spread. The early forms of stegosaurs, which were abundant in late Jurassic, and ankylosaurs, which would replace stegosaurs in Cretaceous times, were present.
In the late Jurassic, the life had diversified and different species became more and more established. The oceans could support a wide variety of marine animals, and the two different groups of plesiosaurs - plesiosauroids and pliosauroids - had become quite distinctive. In the skies, there were many different species of Pterousaurs. The two main types - the more primitive rhamphorhynchoids still existed while the later pterodactyloids started to diversify. Some Theropods (meat-eaters) had become large and scary looking animals, but there were also many Theropod species that were small. The lizard-hipped plant-eaters sauropods had got really large - brachiosaurids and camarasaurids in heigh, and diplocoids in lenght. The smaller, bird-hipped herbivores such as ornithopods and stegosaurs also continued to develop. Jurassic dinosaurs may be the most famous, but the real advanced dinosaurs were yet to evolve during Cretaceous period. Looking for anything?  Custom Search
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