Triassic Quotes

One might expect that mammals would have taken over the land verte­brate communities immediately, but they did not. From their appearance in the Triassic until the end of the Creta­ceous, a span of 140 million years, mam­mals remained smal and inconspicuous while all the ecological roles of large ter­restrial herbivores and carnivores were monopolized by dinosaurs; mammals did not begin to radiate and produce large species until after the dinosaurs had al­ready become extinct at the end of the Cretaceous. One is forced to conclude that dinosaurs were competitively su­perior to mammals as large land vertebrates. And that would be baffling if dinosaurs were "cold-blooded." (Robert T. Bakker)