Roughly spanning from 200 to 150 million years ago, the Jurassic made up the middle of the Mesozoic era when the super continent broke up to form the continents of North America, Eurasia and the southern continent of Gondwana, as the Atlantic Ocean also began to form. Named after the Jura mountain range in the western Alps, where strata from the period were first identified by Prussian naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, the Jurassic was the heyday of the dinosaur, some of which were the largest animals to ever walk the Earth. Much smaller, some of the first flying vertebrates coexisted alongside them, including the archaeopteryx or Urvogel, the 'original bird'.
