Miniature Dinosaurs

This article can be found at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/07/science/07dinosaurs.html?_r=1&ref=science

    It is generally accepted that the Earth has suffered a series of mass extinctions during its 4.5 billion year existence, ending the lines of millions of species of plants and animals. Yet somehow life keeps trucking, evolving past these catastrophes; and it does so through a small number of survivors, very small species that just narrowly avoided extinction, that would eventually give rise to a greater diversity of life forms, such as dinosaurs. This article tells us about the newest scientific discovery in this area. Scientists claim they have found the earliest known relative of the dinosaurs, dating the beginning of the dinosaur era at around 250 million years ago.
    The story is well-written. The writer, Kenneth Chang, has a good lead that immediately provides the reader with an image to carry through the rest of the article: “The earliest known relatives of dinosaurs were the size of a house cat, walked on four legs and left footprints in the quarries in Poland.” And then there is a photograph of the fossilized footprints and an illustration of the “cat-size dinosaur.” Chang does well in keeping the inverse pyramid structure, getting in all the interesting stuff towards the beginning, such as the scientists’ reactions and the implications of the finding—“dinosaurs…originally arose to fill ecological niches opened by an earlier, even greater mass extinction.” It is concise and clear, and it even ventures into the greater topic of global mass extinctions in the history of the Earth.