纪录片《侏罗纪之谜》 第12期 火山爆发（在线收听）

It's very hard to imagine just the scale of the volcanism which starts off at this time.

当时的火山爆发规模大到无法想象的地步

It's vastly greater, several orders of magnitude greater, than anything we see on earth today.

它太剧烈了，级别比当今地球上任何一次火山爆发都要高得多

Thousands of square kilometres of, of red hot lava just pouring out of these fissures in the ground covering a vast area.

数千平方公里的炽热熔岩从裂缝中喷涌上来，覆盖了大片地表

And it wasn't just the lava. These eruptions had pumped out millions of tons of poisonous gases.

而且不只是熔岩。火山爆发还喷出了数百万吨有毒气体

The theory was that these gases had effectively suffocated life in the oceans.

科学家们认为这些气体将使海洋生物窒息

Paradoxically, all this death could have been the dinosaurs big evolutionary break

反过来说，这些死亡可能正是恐龙伟大进化历程的开始

because it's a well known evolutionary theory that mass extinctions can have a dramatic effect on evolution.

因为根据众所周知的进化论，大灭绝能对进化产生戏剧性的作用

Extinction events are obviously bad news for the things that are around at the time,

灭绝事件对于当时那些生物来说无疑是噩梦

but in a way evolution's able to experiment quite a lot at this time

但是从某种程度上，进化能在那个时候进行大量尝试

because there's less sort of competition going on at these moments of time

因为当时竞争之类的因素少了很多

and you often get the sort of major innovations and new, new groups start appearing in the aftermath of extinction events.

而大批新生物种，新生群落就会在大灭绝之后纷纷出现

So could a mass extinction have been responsible for the transformation of the dinosaurs in the mid-Jurassic?

那么，大灭绝真的会导致恐龙在中侏罗世发生剧变吗

It would have created a world free of competition allowing the survivors to evolve into all the new types of dinosaur.

它创造了一个没有竞争的世界，幸存者们得以在此进化成各种新型恐龙。