This title presents the first act in the drama that would become the Mesozoic era, the Age of Reptiles. It explores the roots of the dinosaur family tree and the lifestyle and radiation of the first carnivorous and herbivorous dinosaurs. The first dinosaurs, after living in the shadows of larger, more dominant reptilian kin, took advantage of major mass extinctions at the end of the Triassic period and quickly radiated to widespread geographic ranges. The Late Triassic and Early Jurassic periods were a time of experimentation in dinosaur evolution as the earliest herbivorous and predaceous...