In days gone by, many palaeontologists thought the reason the dinosaurs became extinct was that the big, lumbering reptiles were outcompeted by small, nippy mammals who ate their eggs and generally ran rings around them. This quasi-anthro-pocentric view, of the inevitable rise of humanity's ancestors, took a knock when closer examination showed that dinosaurs, too, were often nimble and warmblooded. Then it was found that the extermination was an accident, caused when an asteroid hit the Earth. Until that moment, the dinosaurs had reigned supreme and mammals were just an afterthought.
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