媒体英语会带大家一起学习BBC撰稿人在报道世界大事时常用到的单词和短语。

Background: 科学家最新发现了两亿五千年前类似恐龙的动物足迹。这一发现将恐龙存活的年代提早了几百万年。

These earliest dinosaur-like animals were about the size of domestic cats. They would have weighed two or three pounds (1 to 1.5 kilos) and walked on four legs.

But what's really intrigued scientists is that they date from two million years after the worst mass extinction event in the history of the planet.

It was a time when volcanic eruptions, sudden global warming and a stagnation of the oceans wiped out more than 90% of all life on Earth.

Up until recently scientists thought that dinosaurs emerged 15 to 20 million years after this event. But the new footprints suggest that they arose directly as a result of the devastation, filling a gaping ecological void. Without the mass extinctions there would have been no dinosaurs.

• domestic [də´mestik]   a.家庭的；本国的   (初中英语单词)
• volcanic [vɔl´kænik]   a.(象)火山的；爆发的   (英语四级单词)
• warming [´wɔ:miŋ]   n.暖和；加温   (英语四级单词)