THE RISE AND FALL OF THE DINOSAURS: A NEW HISTORY OF A LOST WORLD by STEVE BRUSATTE. This sweeping scientific history – the only one of its kind – tells the epic story of the dinosaurs, examining their origins, their habitats, their extinction, and their living legacy.
Author STEVE BRUSATTE traces their inauspicious origins from 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 recreates the dinosaurs’ heyday during the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, 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 (66 million years ago), 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 the earth’s history, one full of lessons for today as we confront a “sixth extinction.”
Along the way, Brusatte recalls compelling stories from his globe-trotting journey studying these legendary beasts during one of the most exciting eras in dinosaur research 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 feathered raptors from China.
Including more than 70 original illustrations and photographs, this electrifying scientific history will be the definitive book on the subject for years to come and is sure to appeal to readers who enjoyed popular science books like Sapiens, Your Inner Fish, The Sixth Extinction, and I Contain Multitudes. As Brusatte writes, “The rise and fall of the dinosaurs is an incredible story, of a time when giant beasts and other fantastic creatures made the world their own. They walked on the very ground below us, their fossils now entombed in rock – the clues that tell this story. To me, it’s one of the greatest narratives in the history of our planet.”