Q 01/05

The Triassic is the first period of which geological era?

A) Mesozoic

B) Paleozoic

C) Cenozoic

D) Neoproterozoic

Answer · why

A) Mesozoic

Mesozoic means 'middle life', a name coined in 1840 for the fossils lying between ancient and recent forms; mass extinctions mark both its start and i...

Q 02/05

Which period came immediately after the Triassic?

A) Permian

B) Cretaceous

C) Devonian

D) Jurassic

Answer · why

D) Jurassic

Jurassic: the extinction that closed the Triassic removed most of the big crocodile-line reptiles, and dinosaurs took over the land in the period that...

Q 03/05

How long did the Triassic last?

A) 500,000 years

B) 5 million years

C) 50 million years

D) 500 million years

Answer · why

C) 50 million years

50 million years makes it the shortest of the three periods of the dinosaur era, yet dinosaurs never dominated it: their reign came afterwards.

Q 04/05

The name Triassic refers to a 'triad' of what?

A) Extinction events

B) Ancient continents

C) German rock layers

D) Reptile lineages

Answer · why

C) German rock layers

German rock layers: the three had been treated as separate formations until 1834, when a saltworks inspector argued from their fossils that they recor...

Q 05/05

Who named the Triassic in 1834?

A) Charles Lyell

B) Roderick Murchison

C) Leopold von Buch

D) Friedrich Alberti

Answer · why

D) Friedrich Alberti

Friedrich Alberti was a saltworks official, not a professor: in the 1820s his own reading of the ground told him where to drill for salt, and he struc...