The Jurassic Period

208 to 146 Million Years Ago

Great plant-eating dinosaurs roaming the earth, feeding on lush growths of ferns and palm-like cycads and bennettitaleans. . . smaller but vicious carnivores stalking the great herbivores. . . oceans full of fish, squid, and coiled ammonites, plus great ichthyosaurs and long-necked plesiosaurs. . . vertebrates taking to the air, like the pterosaurs and the first birds. . . this was the Jurassic Period, beginning 210 million years ago and lasting for 70 million years of the Mesozoic Era.

Named for the Jura Mountains on the border between France and Switzerland, where rocks of this age were first studied, the Jurassic has become a household word with the success of the movie Jurassic Park. Outside of Hollywood, the Jurassic is still important to us today, both because of its wealth of fossils and because of its economic importance -- the oilfields of the North Sea, for instance, are Jurassic in age.