Triassic

It's roughly 30 kilometers south of Petersburg.

Watsky is a silver-gold-zinc-lead vulcanogenic mass of sulfite, so a VMS system that's hosted in the late Triassic rocks of the Alexander Terrain, which is also where the name of the company comes from.

But it's also the same regional belt that hosts the Greens Creek – the project further up north.

Alex now has completed the first modern follow-up drilling at the Mad Dog Target in more than two decades.

And that's about it.

Now, why others didn't go back, I'm not sure.

One more piece of scene setting that I should do here is, You mentioned at the top that there's this belt of rocks that comes down through Southeast Alaska called the Alexander Triassic Belt.

And those are the rocks that host Greens Creek.

They have been very, very successful animals.

I believe true turtles and tortoises, I want to say, show up in the late Triassic period, I think.

And they've been around ever since.

So, yes, there are a bunch of them.

Magirasaurus versus Herrerasaurus.

Ooh! Magirasaurus is sort of a miniature sauropod.

Herrerasaurus is a Triassic dinosaur.

Herrerasaurus definitely has all the weapons necessary, but even though Magirasaurus is a small sauropod, it's still got the sauropod power.

During the Mesozoic era, the era of the dinosaurs, the eroded remnant of the Variscan Mountains was covered by layer upon layer of younger rock.

First came the Bunta sandstone, a reddish sandstone, deposited in the Triassic period when this part of Europe was a desert or a shallow sea.

Then came the Mushell Kulk, a limestone full of fossil shells, then the Cupa, a sequence of mudstones and sandstones, then Jurassic limestones.

The full stack of Triassic and Jurassic layers accumulated over the Variskan basement, burying the billion-year-old gneiss under hundreds of metres of younger stone.

And for a long time, the ancient rock was invisible, hidden beneath the weight of sediment, the way a foundation is hidden beneath a building.

Fall never arrives all at once.

You wouldn't understand.

One Permian mass extinction later, and it's the early Triassic.

Most species seem to have gotten the memo that it's time to stop being so goofy.

Most species.

Modern squamates, along with Rhynchocephalia, belong to the subclass Lepidosauria, which is often considered a sister clade of the archosaurs, which includes the dinosaurs and crocodiles.

The two groups likely diverged in the Permian period, and some of the earliest stem squamates seem to have appeared in the Triassic, though there are a great deal more squamates in the Middle Jurassic, and their diversification really explodes in the Cretaceous, and even more so in the Cenozoic.

Modern squamates range in size from the diminutive dwarf and pygmy geckos to the massive reticulated and Burmese python and green anaconda.

In addition to their large overlapping keratinous scales and periodic molting, Members of this clade are also distinguished by their movable quadrate bones that provide them with kinetic skulls, allowing them to move the upper jaw in addition to the lower jaw so that they can grasp and crush prey, or in the case of the snakes, swallow whole prey much larger than their skulls without chewing.

Sure, they share a common ancestor and both belong to the same big reptile family tree that also includes crocodiles and birds.

But way back in the Triassic, they split off and went their separate ways.

Anyway, like I mentioned earlier, Swoop and the rest of his dino buddies didn't start life as Transformers.

Swoop started in Takara's Diaclone line as Dinosaur Robo No. 5, the Pteranodon, released in Japan in 1983 and designed by Kojin Ono.