203 million years ago, in the late Triassic Period, the U.S. state of Arizona was covered in dense pine berlin. The rainy season is just over, the forest is overgrown with ferns and small insects flying between the leaves. A dozen or so coelentosaurs weaved through them, looking for everything they could eat. They were one of the earliest dinosaurs, but at that time the earth was ruled by large reptiles, and the coelentosaurs could only rely on small insects and small lizards to feed on their stomachs. Suddenly, a terrifying roar came from the distance, and the bone dragon scattered and fled. Because they know that they are weak, there are bigger predators in this forest who will attack them at any time...
The Mesozoic Era was the period when dinosaurs dominated, but in the Triassic Period, when dinosaurs began to appear, there were other powerful animals living on the earth, and dinosaurs could only survive in the shadow of these giant beasts.
Today, let's walk into the world of coelentosaurs and see how early dinosaurs lived.
In 1881, fossil collector David Ballwin discovered fragments of dinosaur fossils in the wasteland of New Mexico. At this time, the "fossil war" between the two giants of the American paleontology community, Kopp and Marsh, is in full swing, and they are eager to find more dinosaur fossils to defeat their opponents. Ballwin sold the newly discovered dinosaur fossil to Kopp. In 1887, Kopp named dinosaur fossils hollow vertebrae based on their hollow properties. Because the dinosaur fossil was too broken, and Kopp was worried that Marsh had found more fossils than himself, he put the dinosaur fossil in the warehouse and devoted himself to the study of the new fossil.
In 1947, in a redstone canyon called Ghost Ranch in New Mexico, Edwin Colbert, a researcher at the American Museum of Natural History, dug up a fossil of a coelentosaur. He was initially preoccupied with excavation, not caring what the digging would be different, but as a result, when he cleaned up the debris around the fossil, another coelentosaur was revealed. In this way, one, two, three, up to hundreds, thousands, large and small coelentosaur fossils gradually exposed. The fossils were so numerous that Colbert had to use large machinery to cut large chunks of rock wrapped in dinosaur fossils and send them to the museum for cleanup. Shockingly, for nearly 70 years, museum staff have been patiently stripping away the rock formations, but to this day the fossils have not been cleaned up.
The bodies of thousands of coelentosaurs were extremely twisted, squeezed together, and looked terrifying. Strange, how can they die en masse? Scientists speculate that there may have been a great flood in the forest at that time, and the corpses of the coelentosaurs were washed together and buried after the flood was drowned, which is why it was so well preserved.
Coelentosaurus lived between the late Triassic and Early Jurassic periods 203 to 196 million years ago, mainly in areas such as today's Arizona and New Mexico. They are 2.5 to 3 meters long, about 1 meter tall, weigh about 20 kg, and belong to the coelentosaur family of theropod dinosaurs.
The body of the cavity bone dragon is slender, agile, and although small in size, it is extremely aggressive. They have more than 50 curved fangs in their mouths, and they have small serrations on their teeth. The forelimbs have three finger claws to grasp prey. They have slender legs and run fast, with a long tail behind them to help them maintain their balance while running at high speeds. Their vision is sharp, and their large eyes help them lock on to their prey. Scientists have found that the vision of coelentosaurs is close to that of today's eagles, and they can accurately catch small animals even in the cluttered jungle.
Among the fossils found at Ghost Ranch, one specimen is striking: an adult coelosaur with some fragmented small bones in its abdomen that may have been its last supper. Some scientists believe that these small bones are of small cavity bone dragons. What the? The Bone Dragon would eat its own kind! The researchers also explained that during the dry season, food was scarce, and when prey was not available, adult coelaosaurs may feed on small coculosaurs in the population.
By 2002, however, things took a turn for the better. Paleontologist Robert Barker carefully analyzed the instrument and found that the small bones in the abdomen of the coelent plesiosaur were not those of the columbal plesiosaur at all, but the bones of a small reptile called the dusk crocodile. Dusk crocodiles are common in the strata of ghost ranches and are one of the main foods of Coelentosaurus. At this point, the misunderstanding of cannibalism of coronosaurus has been clarified.
In addition to feeding on insects and lizards, coelentosaurs also ate fish. In 2006, Mr. and Mrs. Johnson of St. George, Arizona, found a large number of dinosaur footprints on their farm. This is a set of Triassic dinosaur footprints.
The farm was a large lake in the late Triassic period, 198 million years ago, with lush vegetation and a variety of fish living in the lake. Scientists named this lake "Dicksea West Lake". Those dinosaur footprints were left by plesiosaurs, diplodocus and archaicosaurs. The larger Diplodocus fished in the middle of the lake, while the smaller Ceratosaurus fished on the shore.
The lake is home to many freshwater sharks, among which the slippery tooth shark is the favorite food of the dinosaurs. As the most abundant fish in Dixie Lake, the slippery tooth shark is small in size and does not have hard scales on its body, and the sharp teeth of the coelentosaur can easily bite through their bodies. Judging from the footprint fossils, there was also a bold coelentosaur trying to walk towards the center of the lake, only to swim halfway through, and his feet could not reach the bottom of the lake, struggling desperately, almost drowning, and finally returning to the shore in a daze.
In the Triassic period in which coelentosaurs lived, dinosaurs were not overlords on Earth. At this time, the two major families of reptiles, the Hexoptera and the Lizards, were the most powerful on Earth.
In the early Triassic period, the most homophthalmiformes were the most, and the dipterodons represented by the water dragons occupied the entire earth. By the middle and late Triassic period, there were more and more lizards, and one of the long-legged crocodiles, which resembled long-legged crocodiles, was a carnivore at the top of the food chain. By this time, the ancestors of turtles and snakes, as well as the early pterosaurs, had emerged. Small dinosaurs, such as Coelentosaurus, had to survive carefully, or they might become a meal on the plate of other predators if they weren't careful. But with its agile speed and super adaptability, the Cynodontosaurus family eventually flourished. By the late Triassic period, dinosaurs had spread across the continent and gradually became the overlord of the earth. At the beginning of the Jurassic Period, an era belonging to the dinosaurs officially began.
Due to the large number of complete fossils unearthed, the coelentosaurus became famous. As the star dinosaur of the Triassic period, Coelosaurus became the state dinosaur of New Mexico. It is worth mentioning that on January 22, 1998, a fossil bone of the luminal dragon head from the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in the United States boarded the Space Shuttle Endeavour and successfully flew into space.