'Ancient Earth' series brings rare and wonderful dinosaurs back to life

Reliving the planet's fifth extinction.
 By 
Maria Gallucci
 on 
'Ancient Earth' series brings rare and wonderful dinosaurs back to life
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Sure, we all know about the T. rex and stegosaurus. But what about those beaked herbivores that looked like dachshunds and waddled across Pangea? Or the 15-foot-long beast that ate them?

Ancient Earth, a new documentary series on CuriosityStream, takes viewers back hundreds of millions of years, to a time before comets and toxic volcanic activity wiped out the dinosaurs -- an event known as the fifth extinction.

The series, which premiered Monday, revives the dinosaurs that thrived throughout the Permian, Triassic and Cretaceous periods. It arrives as scientists are gathering more evidence that Earth may be living through its sixth extinction.

This time, however, the threat isn't space rocks -- it's humans. Unless we tackle climate change and slow our population growth, around half the species on the planet today could disappear by the middle of the century, by some estimates.

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Maria Gallucci

Maria Gallucci was a Science Reporter at Mashable. She was previously the energy and environment reporter at International Business Times; features editor of Makeshift magazine; clean economy reporter for InsideClimate News; and a correspondent in Mexico City until 2011. Maria holds degrees in journalism and Spanish from Ohio University's Honors Tutorial College.


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