What are Some Mesozoic Animals?
The Mesozoic Era was a huge geologic era that extends from 251 to 65 million years ago, for a total length of about 186 million years. It is preceded by the Paleozoic and followed by the Cenozoic. Mesozoic means “middle animal life”, as it refers to the middle era of animal life. Except for the very beginning of the Mesozoic, the Earth was mostly warm and humid, with high sea levels and continental arrangements substantially different than today’s. Forests extended to high latitudes in the north and south, and the polar ice caps of today were mostly absent. The Mesozoic is appropriately known as the Age of Reptiles or Age of the Dinosaurs, though dinosaurs didn’t evolve until about 20 million years into the period. The Mesozoic began after the worst mass extinction in the history of the planet, the Permian-Triassic extinction, which wiped out 98% of marine genera and 70% of terrestrial vertebrate genera. Before the extinction, the ancestors of mammals, called synapsids, were the domina
