From Popular Mechanics:
When it comes to dinosaurs, the most famous of these gargantuan reptiles roamed the Earth during the Jurassic or the Cretaceous—your stegosauruses, your T. Rexes, and your velociraptors (thanks, Spielberg). But the story of the dinosaur dates back before these two geologic periods, and well into the Triassic, a 50.5-million-year stretch that picked up the pieces following the Permian extinction (a.k.a. The Great Dying) and saw the beginnings of the dinosaur age—only to be cut down to size by another extinction event, known as the end-Triassic.
The Triassic is also the era of Pangea, when all continents formed one, big supercontinent, and living on a particular stretch of Pangea some 233 million years ago was a member of the Herrerasauridae family of carnivorous dinosaurs. This bi-pedal, eight-foot-long Herrerasaurid (though other members of this group could be upwards of 20 feet long) at some point perished in what is now a state in southern Brazil that its present-day human occupants call “Rio Grande do Sul.” (Read more.)
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