The story of millions of years part 15
Late Triassic Europe… 220 Million Years ago With mouths open wide they waited; a host of huge animals with spring-trap jaws, their mottled, warty bodies half submerged in the lake. The water had gone down; the habitable space diminished, and now as summer wore on, the relentless sun evaporating their world about them; the great amphibians were forced ever closer together; reluctant neighbours, neither friends nor foes. Their smaller relatives had long since disappeared; slithering into the forest with the spring rains and those that had not, those that had remained, had been eaten, the metoposaurs having no conscience when it came to consuming their own kind. Now, prisoners of their wet skin, the adults endured the long months together, herded and hungry they played a waiting game; pitting fat reserves against the return of the rains; the water then rising; the myriad braded streams that criss-crossed the Triassic floodplain, overflowing, dispersing the now tr