The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World

Most children fall in love with dinosaurs sometime in their youth. Dr. Steve Brusatte has never gotten over it. This life-long love leaps from every page of The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs and makes for incredibly interesting reading. His childhood heroes are the scientists and fossil collectors who opened the unfathomable millions of years of history to us through the fossil record. Their stories are interwoven with the deciphering of evolutionary pressures and adaptations of the animals leading up to the dinosaurs. This is a very recent book, much of the old wisdom has been thrown out, and new tools, methods, and fossils give a greater picture of how dinosaurs became ascendant. Tyrannosaurus Rex gets two full chapters pretty much to himself, but his cousins and descendants, even to our own day, are given their time and in the sun as well. The book is fun to read. Written with the enthusiasm of a child finding a fossil that turns out to be exceedingly old, and the education, prose, insight, and experience of a scholar who has searched for fossils in virtually every continent, the book moves very quickly. There is a long list of sources to further encourage any interest in dinosaurs. I give this book the highest praise; reading it makes me want to learn more.