Interesting fact for the day

The first flowering plants were in the cretaceous period. I know, that doesn't sounds interesting, but I was interested, and you might understand if you read on

From my extreme curiosity in dinosaurs as a child I still have the book on dinosaurs in the "Usborne Spotter's Guides" series copyright 1980. Usborne were perfectly justified in making books in the same series for birds, butterflies, garden flowers and even ponds and lakes, but dinosaurs?? Maybe I just don't understand because I'm not a "spotter", but I thought there was a good reason why people can't just go out and "spot" dinosaurs. What were they thinking!??

This book clearly describes which dinosaurs were alive at what times. To give you a quick idea, the Earth formed about 4.5 billion years ago, the first life was 3.8 billion years ago, and humans only arrived under half a million years ago. Dinosaurs lived in the Triassic period, the Jurassic period and the Cretaceous period, which were from 225 and 65 million years ago. Dinosaur-like reptiles existed before that, in the Permian period.

Flowers only arrived on the scene in the last of those periods, so lots of dinosaurs existed before there was such a thing as a flower! The Earth evolved stegosaurus, brontosaurus (apatosaurus) and dimetrodon before flowers. These animals never saw a flower!

Interesting fact of the day is unlikely to become a regular feature on this blog for a number of reasons. Here are a few of them: it's been done before, and done better than I would do; I don't write posts every day; I don't have interesting facts every day. This fact was actually my interesting fact for 15 days ago, and it could just as well be called "Interesting Fact For 135 million years ago", but it's hard to claim it to be especially interesting today.