The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs
2018 • 416 pages
Ratings32
Average rating4.1
15
Ratings32
Average rating4.1
"THE ULTIMATE DINOSAUR BIOGRAPHY," hails Scientific American: A thrilling new history of the age of dinosaurs, from one of our finest young scientists. "A masterpiece of science writing." —Washington Post A New York Times Bestseller • Goodreads Choice Awards Winner • A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: Smithsonian, Science Friday, The Times (London), Popular Mechanics, Science News "This is scientific storytelling at its most visceral, striding with the beasts through their Triassic dawn, Jurassic dominance, and abrupt demise in the Cretaceous." —Nature The 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. Includes 75 images, world maps of the prehistoric earth, and a dinosaur family tree.
Series
3 primary books8 released booksThe Rise and Fall is a 8-book series with 3 primary works first released in 2018 with contributions by Steve Brusatte, Michael J. Sullivan, and Stephen Brusatte.
Reviews with the most likes.
The book contains a good deal of accurate, up-to-date information about dinosaur paleontology. Unfortunately, there are issues with the writing that prevent this book from being as excellent as it could have been. The tone is relatively informal for a science book, and as someone with a basic level of knowledge of paleontology from an intense childhood interest in the field, I found some of the introductory material borderline patronizing.
The principal issue plaguing the book is that Brusatte is trying to write, at the same time, a summary of dinosaur paleontology and a memoir of his experiences in the field. I had to force myself to slog through passages in which Brusatte describes his specific fossil-hunting expeditions or biographizes a paleontologist he knows. Those readers searching for insight into the current state of paleontology academia may find such passages interesting, but even then, these passages are limited to Brusatte's own experience and perception; as other reviewers have noted, a great deal of emphasis is placed on male contributors to the field.
If the book were organized in such a way that readers could easily skip Brusatte's anecdotes without missing any of the paleontological conclusions therein derived, I would be more willing to forgive him, but the portions in question are nested within the paleontological information of each chapter.
Paleontology is one of the fastest-advancing fields of science. If you're not up-to-date on recent discoveries concerning dinosaurs, this book might be worth reading to glean some new information. I definitely picked up at least a few new pieces of knowledge. However, if you're looking for the definitive dinosaur book for adults, then you and I will have to keep looking together.
