Various: A study just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, by Jessica Whiteside of Brown University in Rhode Island and colleagues, has come up with a plausible explanation for the rise of the dinosaurs such as Tyrannosaurus rex.
Their predecessors, aetosaurs, phytosaurs, shuvosaurs among others, and other common lifeforms of the Triassic period went extinct by the geological chaos that created the North Atlantic Ocean.
The evidence is in the large fluctuations of between different types of carbon isotopes embedded in the rock (carbon-12 and carbon-13). These fluctuations reflect perturbations of the carbon cycle including a transient increase in CO2 around the time giant volcanic eruptions split Pangaea, the single super continent that made up the land mass at the time.
Related links
Compound-specific carbon isotopes from Earth's largest flood basalt eruptions directly linked to the end-Triassic mass extinction PNAS
Epic volcanism wiped out dinosaurs’ primary competitors BBC
The rise of the dinosaurs: Easy come, easy go The Economist
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