The reign of the dinosaurs may be over, but Brusatte reminds us that some dinosaurs survived and are still with us today as birds, on which much more in The Ascent of Birds: How Modern Science is Revealing their Story. rex and the Crater of Doom, and the various lines of evidence leading up to it. Brusatte ends with the Cretaceous mass extinction, Alvarez’s impact hypothesis, detailed in T.
Two chapters introduce the tyrannosaurs and its most famous representative: Tyrannosaurus rex, which Hone details further in The Tyrannosaur Chronicles: The Biology of the Tyrant Dinosaurs.Īnd then there is the evolution of flight and the fantastic fossil discoveries of feathered dinosaurs in recent decades (some good entry-level books are Feathered Dinosaurs: The Origin of Birds or Flying Dinosaurs: How Fearsome Reptiles Became Birds). We meet the sauropods, gigantic long-necked herbivores, and the various theropod carnivores that terrorised them. After the end-Triassic mass extinction, the dinosaurs were left standing and rose to dominance during the Jurassic and Cretaceous. He talks us through the Triassic, when all the world was united in the supercontinent Pangaea, small dinosaurs competed with early mammal relatives, and the world was ruled by a reptilian sister group that would leave us the crocodiles. As in Martin’s The Evolution Underground, Brusatte advances the idea that underground burrows were crucial to survival.īrusatte introduces the dinosauromorphs, the close evolutionary forebears of the dinosaurs. Brannen’s recent book The Ends of the World did a marvellous job introducing the five major mass extinctions, but Brusatte can be equally evocative in his descriptions.
Ordered roughly chronologically, it starts off with the Permian mass extinction some 252 million years ago. The current book, however, is a pop-science account of these fascinating reptiles.
“ The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: The Untold Story of a Lost World”, written by Steve Brusatte, published in Europe by Macmillan in April 2018 (hardback, 404 pages)īrusatte has previously authored the textbook Dinosaur Paleobiology.
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