"How can you tell apart a Brachiosaurus from an Apatosaurus? Did one have a longer tail? What did each dinosaur's feet look like? Find out these answers and more to become an expert on the differences between these supersized creatures."--

This 2005 edition of The Evolution and Extinction of the Dinosaurs is a unique, comprehensive treatment of this fascinating group of organisms. It is a detailed survey of dinosaur origins, their diversity, and their eventual extinction. The book can easily be used as a teaching textbook for a class, but it is also written as a series of readable, entertaining essays covering important and timely topics appealing to non-specialists and all dinosaur enthusiasts: birds as 'living dinosaurs', the new feathered dinosaurs from China, 'warm-bloodedness'. Along the way, the reader learns about dinosaur functional morphology, physiology, and systematics using cladistic methodology - in short, how professional paleontologists and dinosaur experts go about their work, and why they find it so rewarding. The book is spectacularly illustrated by John Sibbick, a world-famous illustrator of dinosaurs, commissioned exclusively for this book.

Surveys the dinosaurs and other smaller prehistoric reptiles and describes many individual species.

"Provocative and delightfully discursive essays on natural history. . . . Gould is the Stan Musial of essay writing. He can work himself into a corkscrew of ideas and improbable allusions paragraph after paragraph and then, uncoiling, hit it with such power that his fans know they are experiencing the game of essay writing at its best."--John Noble Wilford, New York Times Book Review

Traveling to different parts of the world, visiting museums, or going out on dinosaur digs are just part of what Sylvia and I do in our work. When we are back home we continue our research, "digging" through reference books. There is a great deal of studying. But even this is thrilling. Like detectives, we solve mysteries and gain our information from ancient fossilized clues to the past.

The Rocky Mountains and surrounding areas contain some of the biggest and best preserved dinosaur remains on earth. This book describes the types that have been found, where they were located, and the museums that display them.