Dinosaur Timeline

Dinosaur Timeline

Dinosaur Timeline
Reading Level

	edHelper's suggested reading level:	grades 5 to 7
	Flesch-Kincaid grade level:	8.93

Vocabulary

	challenging words:		fish-eating, velociraptor, recording, extinction, writing, plant-eating, mass, wooly, lasted, separate, earth, history, flying, beginning, during, early
	content words:		Paleozoic Era, Mesozoic Era, Cenozoic Era, Triassic Period, Jurassic Period, Cretaceous Period, This Era, Ice Age

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Dinosaur Timeline
By Sharon Fabian

¹     The prehistoric times on earth go back even farther than the dinosaurs and lasted for millions of years. This stretch of millions of years is usually divided into three big sections called Eras. First there was the Paleozoic Era, then the Mesozoic Era, and then the Cenozoic Era. We call most of this time prehistoric because it happened before there was any way of writing down, or recording, history. Most of what we know about these early times comes from fossils.

²     The Paleozoic Era lasted from about 570 million years ago to about 240 million years ago. This was hundreds of millions of years! During this long stretch of time the earth went through lots of changes. The landmasses that we call continents today drifted and changed places. At the end of the Paleozoic Era the continents were probably all attached in one giant land mass that has been named Pangaea. Shallow seas probably covered most of the earth. There was life on earth during this era, but no dinosaurs yet. First would have come the tiny life forms such as bacteria. Invertebrates such as trilobites, jellyfish, and worms probably developed early on. Then came early vertebrates, maybe starting with little fish. Still no dinosaurs.

³     The era from about 240 million years ago to about 65 million years ago is called the Mesozoic Era. At the beginning of this era, the earth still had just one giant continent, Pangaea, but by the end the land had drifted apart until the continents were separate and almost like they are today. The Mesozoic Era is called the age of reptiles, and that includes DINOSAURS! During the almost 200 million years of the Mesozoic Era many, many kinds of dinosaurs lived on earth from little ones about the size of a chicken to the giant of giants, the 85 foot long Brachiosaurus. At the end of the Mesozoic Era all of the dinosaurs died out in a huge extinction. No one is sure how it happened.

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