The 2 Million Years of Rain That Changed Earth Forever

The Triassic's 2-million-year rainy age didn't create the dinosaurs, but it changed which animals got to spread. About 234 million years ago, the Carnian Pluvial Episode buried tropical reefs under river sand and reshuffled life across Pangaea. An immersive documentary that follows the water. We start on a reef coast in what is now the Dolomites as the first floods arrive, follow the carbon to the volcano that most likely released it, then move through forests that bled resin, seas that lost their oxygen and a southern floodplain where dinosaurs were one fossil in ten. The question running through it all: how could a change in the rain alter which animals spread across the land? 00:00 — Sand on the Reefs 04:33 — Where the Rivers Met the Reef 12:18 — Lava on the Far Side of the World 20:11 — Four Pulses Across a Supercontinent 28:00 — Forests That Bled Resin 34:47 — Sea Lilies on Driftwood 41:51 — More Beaks Than Dinosaurs 48:19 — Footprints Above the Rain 55:23 — The Green Ledge SELECTED SOURCES Dal Corso et al. (2020). Extinction and dawn of the modern world in the Carnian (Late Triassic). Science Advances. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aba0099 Dal Corso et al. (2012). Discovery of a major negative δ13C spike in the Carnian (Late Triassic) linked to the eruption of Wrangellia flood basalts. Geology. https://doi.org/10.1130/G32473.1 Bernardi et al. (2018). Dinosaur diversification linked with the Carnian Pluvial Episode. Nature Communications. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-03... Lovelace et al. (2025). Rethinking dinosaur origins: oldest known equatorial dinosaur-bearing assemblage (mid-late Carnian Popo Agie Fm, Wyoming, USA). Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society. https://doi.org/10.1093/zoolinnean/zl... #triassic #dinosaurs #documentary