The Rise And Fall Of The Dinosaurs: The Untold Story Of A Lost World

Author: Steve Brusatte

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  • : 32.99 AUD
  • : 9781509830077
  • : Pan Macmillan
  • : Macmillan
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  • : 0.542
  • : December 2017
  • : 234mm X 153mm
  • : United Kingdom
  • : 32.99
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  • : books

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  • : Steve Brusatte
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  • : Paperback
  • : proof
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  • : English
  • : 567.9
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  • : 416
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Barcode 9781509830077
9781509830077

Description

"THE ULTIMATE DINOSAUR BIOGRAPHY," hails Scientific American: A thrilling new history of the age of dinosaurs, from one of our finest young scientists. Now a New York Times bestseller! "This is scientific storytelling at its most visceral, striding with the beasts through their Triassic dawn, Jurassic dominance, and abrupt demise in the Cretaceous." -- Nature The dinosaurs. Sixty-six million years ago, the Earth's most fearsome creatures vanished. Today they remain one of our planet's great mysteries. Now The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs reveals their extraordinary, 200-million-year-long story as never before. In this captivating narrative (enlivened with more than seventy original illustrations and photographs), Steve Brusatte, a young American paleontologist who has emerged as one of the foremost stars of the field--naming fifteen new species and leading groundbreaking scientific studies and fieldwork--masterfully tells the complete, surprising, and new history of the dinosaurs, drawing on cutting-edge science to dramatically bring to life their lost world and illuminate their enigmatic origins, spectacular flourishing, astonishing diversity, cataclysmic extinction, and startling living legacy. Captivating and revelatory, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs is a book for the ages. Brusatte traces the evolution of dinosaurs from their inauspicious start as small shadow dwellers--themselves the beneficiaries of a mass extinction caused by volcanic eruptions at the beginning of the Triassic period--into the dominant array of species every wide-eyed child memorizes today, T. rex, Triceratops, Brontosaurus, and more. This gifted scientist and writer re-creates the dinosaurs' peak during the Jurassic and Cretaceous, when thousands of species thrived, and winged and feathered dinosaurs, the prehistoric ancestors of modern birds, emerged. The story continues to the end of the Cretaceous period, when a giant asteroid or comet struck the planet and nearly every dinosaur species (but not all) died out, in the most extraordinary extinction event in earth's history, one full of lessons for today as we confront a "sixth extinction." Brusatte also recalls compelling stories from his globe-trotting expeditions during one of the most exciting eras in dinosaur research--which he calls "a new golden age of discovery"--and offers thrilling accounts of some of the remarkable findings he and his colleagues have made, including primitive human-sized tyrannosaurs; monstrous carnivores even larger than T. rex; and paradigm-shifting feathered raptors from China. An electrifying scientific history that unearths the dinosaurs' epic saga, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs will be a definitive and treasured account for decades to come.

Promotion info

Before there was Homo sapiens there were the dinosaurs. A thrilling re-evaluation of the creatures that ruled the earth for 150 million years by one of the world's leading paleontologists.

Author description

Dr Steve Brusatte is a paleontologist on the faculty of the School of GeoSciences at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. He grew up in the Midwestern United States and has a BS in Geophysical Sciences from the University of Chicago, MSc in Palaeobiology from the University of Bristol (UK), and PhD in Earth and Environmental Sciences from Columbia University in New York. At age thirty-one, Steve is widely recognized as one of the leading paleontologists of his generation. He has written over one hundred peer-reviewed scientific papers during his decade of research in the field, named and described over ten new species of dinosaurs, and led groundbreaking studies on how dinosaurs rose to dominance and went extinct. One of his particular research interests is the evolutionary transition between dinosaurs and birds and he is a noted specialist on the anatomy, genealogy, and evolution of the carnivorous dinosaurs like Tyrannosaurus and Velociraptor.

Table of contents

Section - i: Prologue: The Golden Age of DiscoveryChapter - 1: The Dawn of the DinosaursChapter - 2: Dinosaurs Rise UpChapter - 3: Dinosaurs Become DominantChapter - 4: Dinosaurs and Drifting ContinentsChapter - 5: The Tyrant DinosaursChapter - 6: The King of the DinosaursChapter - 7: Dinosaurs at the Top of Their GameChapter - 8: Dinosaurs Take FlightChapter - 9: Dinosaurs Die OutSection - ii: Epilogue: After the DinosaursAcknowledgements - iii: AcknowledgementsSection - iv: Notes on SourcesIndex - v: Index