Oh, wow, oh, oh, whoa, oh, wow.

Oh, wow.

Oh, wow. Hello, you're listening to the Science of Everything podcast, episode 161, dinosaurs and other ancient reptiles.

I'm your host, James Fodor.

So this episode is going to be continuing from our discussion of evolutionary history.

So the recommended pre-listening is the prior episode, 160, the evolutionary origins of animals.

So in that episode, we discussed the evolutionary development of animals from the Tonian period,

around 760 million years ago, with their split from early single-cellular, single-celled

protests, right up until the development of the fissopods, so the first

sort of tetrapods that came out of oceans onto land, and we discussed a bit about the early

amphibium-like terrestrial animals that exist in the carboniferous.

And we sort of, so we finished up late Carboniferous, early Permian,

at the time of the origin of the amniotes. And so in this episode, we're going to pick up from there

and talk about the amniotes that dominated terrestrial ecosystems from the, in the Permian period,

as well as in the subsequent Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous periods. So mostly the Mesozoic era, which is those three, but also the Permian, which was the final period of the Paleozoic era.

So I'm going to talk about all of the major terrestrial amniote animals that existed at that time.

Recall the amniotes are the clade of animals that are more adapted for life on land, so they're less dependent on the water.

Having readily access to water, they have tougher skin, they can live in dry environments, they don't need to lay their eggs in water like amphibians do.

So we talked about those adaptations last time.

So those are the animals we're going to focus on now. Current day living amniotes include reptiles, mammals, and birds.

And so in this episode we're going to discuss their ancestors during the very end of the Paleozoic

and then throughout the Mesozoic eras.

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