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The world before Sapiens makes us reflect. If today we wear the crown that once belonged to the dinosaurs, could what happened to them happen to us?
In The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs , Steve Brusatte, a young American paleontologist who has emerged as a leader in the field—having named fifteen new species and coordinated groundbreaking scientific studies and fieldwork in recent years—tells the complete, surprising, and unprecedented story of the dinosaurs. Drawing on the most recent scientific discoveries, he reconstructs this lost world and illuminates its enigmatic origins, spectacular evolution, astonishing diversity, cataclysmic extinction, and lasting legacy.
The author recalls interesting passages from his travels around the world during one of the most incredible periods for dinosaur research—which he calls the “golden age”—and tells of the major discoveries made by him and his colleagues, such as a primitive tyrannosaurus the size of a human; monstrous carnivores even larger than T. rex ; and the Chinese dinosaur that had feathers and broke paradigms.
Brusatte follows the evolution of dinosaurs from their inauspicious beginnings as small shadow creatures—beneficiaries of a mass extinction caused by volcanic eruptions in the early Triassic period—to the array of dominant species known to every child today: T. rex , Triceratops , Brontosaurus , and others.
A skilled writer and scientist, the author recreates the heyday of the dinosaurs during the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, when thousands of species evolved and the first winged and feathered dinosaurs, the prehistoric ancestors of today's birds, also emerged. The story continues until the end of the Cretaceous period, when a gigantic asteroid or comet struck the planet and wiped out (almost) all existing dinosaur species, in the most extraordinary mass extinction ever recorded on Earth, which can foreshadow and teach us much about the approaching so-called "sixth extinction."
66 million years ago, Earth's most feared creatures perished. Today, they remain one of our planet's greatest mysteries. The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs reveals, as never before, an extraordinary 200-million-year saga.
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