18-315 WORLD OF DINOSAURS (AN UPDATED REPEAT)

18-315 WORLD OF DINOSAURS  (AN UPDATED REPEAT)

Byron Cotter, Tuesdays 10 am - noon

HOA1 Activity Center, 11/20, 11/27, 12/4, 12/11, 12/18

Dinosaurs are the iconic monsters of legends, cartoons, and movies, but there is also a well established and growing science base that reveals how they lived in and interacted with the world of their era.   This course surveys that science base, starting with the first dinosaurs’ appearance in the Triassic period, some 240 million years ago, to the mass extinction 66 million years ago that wiped them all out, except for birds, today’s surviving dinosaurs.  The course also explores many of their contemporaries - archosaurs, early mammals, the flying reptilian pterosaurs, and various “sea monsters”.  Also covered are the “bone hunters”, the paleontologists who have traveled the world finding the fossil remains of these creatures.