Upside Down

John Mitchinson reveals how some bipedal dinosaurs never died out

Evolutionary history teaches us that it’s not always the dominant species that are best equipped to play the hand that fate deals them.

When a piece of space debris the size of central London slammed into what is now the Yucatán peninsula in Mexico, 66 million years ago, there were no obvious winners.

Three-quarters of the planet’s species went extinct, including all the large and medium-sized vertebrates on land and in the ocean. It took 10 million years before ecosystems reached pre-extinction levels of diversity.