The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs, Steve Brusatte
The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs, Steve Brusatte
8 Rating(s)
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The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs
A New History of a Lost World

Author: Steve Brusatte

Narrator: Patrick Lawlor

Unabridged: 10 hr 7 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: HarperAudio

Published: 04/24/2018


Synopsis

A sweeping and revelatory new history of the age of dinosaurs, from one of our finest young scientists. ""THE ULTIMATE DINOSAUR BIOGRAPHY.""  — Scientific AmericanThe 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.

About Steve Brusatte

Steve Brusatte, PhD, is an American paleontologist who teaches at the University of Edinburgh, in Scotland. He is the author of the international bestseller The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs and The Rise and Reign of the Mammals. The paleontology advisor on the Jurassic World film franchise, Brusatte has named more than fifteen new species, including the tyrannosaur “Pinocchio rex” (Qianzhousaurus), the raptor Zhenyuanlong, and several ancient mammals. His research and writing has been featured in Science, the New York Times, Scientific American, and many other publications.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Emily May on December 24, 2018

I love dinosaurs. I have an early memory of being at nursery school and always running straight for the plastic dinosaurs at playtime. I was a dinosaur hog. The Land Before Time was one of my favourite movies. I watched Jurassic Park and had a recurring nightmare about a T.Rex trying to attack our h......more

Goodreads review by Will on April 20, 2022

Image from the SmithsonianHope A Tyrannosaurus Rex is a thing with feathers. ----- Emily Dickinson Steve BrusatteWait, what? You’re kidding, right? Say it ain’t so. Well, there is some disagreement about this among paleontologists, but, according to Steve Brusatte, while they may not hav......more

Goodreads review by Emily on March 31, 2019

Another ambivalent three stars for a book that has two strands of highly varying success in my opinion. The good part of the book is the clear and vivid writing about dinosaurs. I particularly liked learning new things about dinosaur-like creatures that lived among them but happen to fall outside the......more

Goodreads review by Debra on July 28, 2019

Now that I am an expert on dinosaurs...... lol, not even close to being an expert but I did learn a lot from this book. For instance, new species of dinosaurs are still being discovered, they weren't always big, and about the big "bang/meteor" which ended their reign on earth. My interest in dinosaurs......more

Goodreads review by ☾❀Miriam✩ on May 12, 2019

If, like me, you were a kid during the Jurassic Park era, you know that the new generations have an interest in dinosaurs which is ten hundred times less than we had in the 1990s. At the time, dinosaurs were everywhere: on TV, on our first computers, in video games, even in cereal boxes. Sometimes I......more