Tour audio Hall «The Era of dinosaurs»

Dinosaurs means in Latin «terrible reptiles».  Dinosaurs are first tetrapods, learned to go on vertical paws. Dinosaurs appeared in the middle of the Triassic and extinct in the end of the Cretaceous.

Dinosaurs were extremely varied in shape and size. There were small, not big than modern cats, and the giants, which reached 30-40 m in length and weighing about 30 tons; they were mobile and clumsy, who walked on two and four legs, carnivorous and herbivorous, covered with scales and lacking of armor.

First Dinosaurs mastered air space. Flying reptiles – pterosaurs - had long sharp membranous wings (like the wings of bats).

Among pterosaurs there were toothy Rhamphorhynchidae which had a tail and narrow wings, and wide wings toothless pterodactyls with wingspan to 8 m. Flying reptiles lived during the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, their extinction was connected with appearance of birds that were more adapted to life in the air environment.