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Throughout most of the Mesozoic, the seas were inhabited by various groups of marine reptiles, one of them being the long-necked plesiosaurs. One sub-group of the reptiles called the pliosaurs, known for their relatively shorter necks, were apex predators during the Middle to Late Jurassic.

Approximately 201.3 million years ago the Triassic Period ended, taking most of the large land animals with it in a large extinction event. This mass extinction kickstarted the Jurassic Period and the diversification of dinosaurs, which spread out to fill the niches emptied by the extinction.

Spadefoot toads (Pelobatoidea) are a group of toads which posses a bony “spade” on their foot that they use to burrow underground. A fossil found in Mongolia from the Paleocene suggests that burrowing did not evolve as a response to aridity as previously thought.