Who they were, what they did, and how they did it. But of course dinosaurs were never isolated in nature. They were parts of complex ecosystems and owe their identities as much to their ecological context as to their phylogenetic relationships. The problem is that phylogenetic relationships are considerably easier to reconstruct than the vagaries of ecosystems now defunct over 65 Ma. Our initial goal here will be to take a first pass at understanding the great rhythms of dinosaurs evolution, and then to Integrate these into a large-scale ecological context, to obtain a feel for what dinosaurs as a group did over time, and to was kinds of global event they were responding.