A time-traveling field guide to the ancient version of Big Bend National Park. The sheer beauty of Big Bend National Park, along the shores of the Rio Grande in west Texas, never fails to astonish. Yet what lies beneath this natural treasure may be even more extraordinary than what meets the eye. Hidden in the rocks of Big Bend are the remains of giants: toothy sea lizards, enormous flying reptiles, and dinosaurs. Dinosaurs and Other Ancient Animals of Big Bend is a field guide to what once was. Inspired by the latest research, Cindi Sirois Collins and Asher Elbein imagine what it was like to walk among the plants and animals whose fossil remains tell the story of evolution and geological transformation in this singular landscape. We glimpse the drama of Big Bend’s rugged landscape in creation—the desert’s emergence from retreating oceans and volcanic eruptions. Immersive vignettes introduce dinosaurs, giant fish, and saber-toothed cats. And the history of discovery in the park proves a gripping tale, as paleontologists sifted major scientific insights from the soils, rocks, and riverbeds. Complete with vivid illustrations, this is a wholly original sensory and narrative experience that will deepen any reader’s knowledge and sense of wonder.

Nothing fills us with a sense of wonder like fossils. What looks at first like a simple rock is in fact a clue that reveals the staggering diversity of ancient environments, the winding pathways of evolution, and the majesty of a vanished earth. But as much as one might daydream of digging a hole in the backyard and finding a Tyrannosaurus, only a few places contain these buried treasures, and when a scientist comes across a remnant of prehistoric life, great care must be taken. What do budding paleontologists need to know before starting their search? In Fantastic Fossils, Donald R. Prothero offers an accessible, entertaining, and richly illustrated guide to the paleontologist’s journey. He details the best places to look for fossils, the art of how to find them, and how to classify the major types. Prothero provides expert wisdom about typical fossils that an average person can hope to collect and how to hunt fossils responsibly and ethically. He also explores the lessons that both common and rarer discoveries offer about paleontology and its history, as well as what fossils can tell us about past climates and present climate change. Captivating illustrations by the paleoartist Mary Persis Williams bring to life hundreds of important specimens. Offering valuable lessons for armchair enthusiasts and paleontology students alike, Fantastic Fossils is an essential companion for all readers who have ever dreamed of going in search of traces of a lost world.

Every volume of Science Comics offers a complete introduction to a particular topic--dinosaurs, coral reefs, the solar system, volcanoes, bats, flying machines, and more. These gorgeously illustrated graphic novels offer wildly entertaining views of their subjects.

The burnt-red badlands of Montana's Hell Creek are a vast graveyard of the Cretaceous dinosaurs that lived 68 million years ago. Those hills were, much later, also home to the Sioux, the Crows, and the Blackfeet, the first people to encounter the dinosaur fossils exposed by the elements. What did Native Americans make of these stone skeletons, and how did they explain the teeth and claws of gargantuan animals no one had seen alive? Did they speculate about their deaths? Did they collect fossils? Beginning in the East, with its Ice Age monsters, and ending in the West, where dinosaurs lived and died, this richly illustrated and elegantly written book examines the discoveries of enormous bones and uses of fossils for medicine, hunting magic, and spells. Well before Columbus, Native Americans observed the mysterious petrified remains of extinct creatures and sought to understand their transformation to stone. In perceptive creation stories, they visualized the remains of extinct mammoths, dinosaurs, pterosaurs, and marine creatures as Monster Bears, Giant Lizards, Thunder Birds, and Water Monsters. Their insights, some so sophisticated that they anticipate modern scientific theories, were passed down in oral histories over many centuries. Drawing on historical sources, archaeology, traditional accounts, and extensive personal interviews, Adrienne Mayor takes us from Aztec and Inca fossil tales to the traditions of the Iroquois, Navajos, Apaches, Cheyennes, and Pawnees. Fossil Legends of the First Americans represents a major step forward in our understanding of how humans made sense of fossils before evolutionary theory developed.

Following on from Dinosaur Art, this new volume showcases 10 amazing artists whose work represents the cutting edge of paleoart. Many are rising stars in the field; others have embraced digital technology and continue to assert long-standing reputations as leaders in the discipline. This volume also includes state-of-the-art modellers, allowing the reader to explore restoring prehistoric animals in three as well as two dimensions. All accompanied by insights into the cutting of paleontological researcher and the very latest discoveries, with commentaries by respected scientists at the top of their fields.

The Grand Staircase region, located in Southern Utah, is highly regarded as one of the best places in the world to study the period near the end of the Age of Dinosaurs--a time called the Late Cretaceous. In a relatively short period (geologically speaking) of about 25 million years, southern Utah was at times covered with an ocean teeming with life, swampy shorelines, and massive rivers draining a huge mountain range in the west. This diversity of plant and animal life has led to incredible fossil discoveries in the Late Cretaceous rocks, that have become a critical piece in a puzzle that stretches from Alaska to Mexico. In Where Dinosaurs Roamed, Christa Sadler looks at this important era in the history of life. Modern mammals, birds, and flowering plants were just getting their start, slowly gaining ground in the ecosystems of the time. Many of the fossils that paleontologists have found in southern Utah are unique: big, headline-grabbing creatures such as a dinosaur with fifteen horns; a distinctive cousin of Tyrannosaurus rex; a peculiar scissor-clawed dinosaur with feathers; and a thirty-foot long alligator relative. Add to this a host of smaller vertebrates, invertebrates, and plants, and paleontologists have been able to recreate entire ecosystems from the time between 74 and 100 million years ago. Altogether, these finds paint a picture of life in a very hot world, and may have lessons to teach us about our future world as well.

Toward the end of the Age of Dinosaurs, during a time known as the Late Cretaceous, a new type of giant predator appeared along the southern coasts of North America. It was a huge species of crocodylian called Deinosuchus. Neither a crocodile nor an alligator, it was an ancestor of both modern groups; it reached weights of many tons and it had some features unique to its own species. Average-sized individuals were bigger than the carnivorous dinosaurs with which they co-existed; the largest specimens were the size of a T-rex. King of the Crocodylians, the biography of these giant beasts, tells the long history of their discovery and reports on new research about their makeup. The book also deals with the ancient life and geology of the coastal areas where Deinosuchus thrived, its competitors, and its prey, which probably included carnivorous dinosaurs. There is also detailed discussion of the methods used to determine the size of these giant animals, the dating of the fossils, the nature of their living environments, and how we know who ate whom 80 million years ago.

This groundbreaking book reveals that, far from being sluggish reptiles, dinosaurs were actually agile, fast, warm-blooded, and intelligent. The author explodes the old orthodoxies and gives us a convincing picture of how dinosaurs hunted, fed, mated, fought and died.Containing over 200 detailed illustrations, The Great Dinosaur Debate will enthrall "dinosaurmaniacs". It is a bold new look at the extraordinary reign and eventual extinction of the awesome behemoths who ruled the earth for 150 million years. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

In this stunningly original book, Richard Wrangham argues that it was cooking that caused the extraordinary transformation of our ancestors from apelike beings to Homo erectus. At the heart of Catching Fire lies an explosive new idea: the habit of eating cooked rather than raw food permitted the digestive tract to shrink and the human brain to grow, helped structure human society, and created the male-female division of labour. As our ancestors adapted to using fire, humans emerged as "the cooking apes". Covering everything from food-labelling and overweight pets to raw-food faddists, Catching Fire offers a startlingly original argument about how we came to be the social, intelligent, and sexual species we are today. "This notion is surprising, fresh and, in the hands of Richard Wrangham, utterly persuasive ... Big, new ideas do not come along often in evolution these days, but this is one." -Matt Ridley, author of Genome