At the beginning of the age of dinosaurs (during the Triassic Period, about 230 million years ago), the continents were arranged together as a single supercontinent called Pangea. During the 165 million years of dinosaur existence this supercontinent slowly broke apart.
Most of the dinosaurs we have found lived along ancient rivers or streams. They roamed across the adjacent forested floodplains and densely vegetated swamps and lakes. Some discoveries have also shown that dinosaurs inhabited ancient deserts strewn with fields of sand dunes.
Dinosaurs are extinct and there have been no trace of them coming back to life. They have been extinct but we tend to find fossils of dinosaurs around the world.
The first dinosaur fossils were recognized in the early 19th century, with the name “dinosaur” (meaning “terrible lizard”) being coined by Sir Richard Owen in 1842 to refer to these “great fossil lizards”.
They were discovered in the mid-1600s, when a fossil bone was acquired by Dr Robert Plot. He was the first keeper of Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum. He noted that it looked almost exactly like the lower part of a human femur.
They lived for over 140 million years during the Mesozoic era, a period of time which extended from approximately 225 million to 65 million years ago.