Paleontology is one of the most visible yet most misunderstood fields of science. Children dream of becoming paleontologists when they grow up. Museum visitors flock to exhibits on dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals. The media reports on fossil discoveries and new clues to mass extinctions. Nonetheless, misconceptions abound: paleontologists are assumed only to be interested in dinosaurs, and they are all too often imagined as bearded white men in battered cowboy hats. Roy Plotnick provides a behind-the-scenes look at paleontology as it exists today in all its complexity. He explores the field’s aims, methods, and possibilities, with an emphasis on the compelling personal stories of the scientists who have made it a career. Paleontologists study the entire history of life on Earth; they do not only use hammers and chisels to unearth fossils but are just as likely to work with cutting-edge computing technology. Plotnick presents the big questions about life’s history that drive paleontological research and shows why knowledge of Earth’s past is essential to understanding present-day environmental crises. He introduces readers to the diverse group of people of all genders, races, and international backgrounds who make up the twenty-first-century paleontology community, foregrounding their perspectives and firsthand narratives. He also frankly discusses the many challenges that face the profession, with key takeaways for aspiring scientists. Candid and comprehensive, Explorers of Deep Time is essential reading for anyone curious about the everyday work of real-life paleontologists.

National Bestseller • New York Times “100 Notable Books of the Year” • NPR “Favorite Books of 2019” • Guardian “100 Best Books of the 21st Century” • Winner of the National Outdoor Book Award From the best-selling, award-winning author of Landmarks and The Old Ways, a haunting voyage into the planet’s past and future. Hailed as "the great nature writer of this generation" (Wall Street Journal), Robert Macfarlane is the celebrated author of books about the intersections of the human and the natural realms. In Underland, he delivers his masterpiece: an epic exploration of the Earth’s underworlds as they exist in myth, literature, memory, and the land itself. In this highly anticipated sequel to his international bestseller The Old Ways, Macfarlane takes us on an extraordinary journey into our relationship with darkness, burial, and what lies beneath the surface of both place and mind. Traveling through “deep time”—the dizzying expanses of geologic time that stretch away from the present—he moves from the birth of the universe to a post-human future, from the prehistoric art of Norwegian sea caves to the blue depths of the Greenland ice cap, from Bronze Age funeral chambers to the catacomb labyrinth below Paris, and from the underground fungal networks through which trees communicate to a deep-sunk “hiding place” where nuclear waste will be stored for 100,000 years to come. Woven through Macfarlane’s own travels are the unforgettable stories of descents into the underland made across history by explorers, artists, cavers, divers, mourners, dreamers, and murderers, all of whom have been drawn for different reasons to seek what Cormac McCarthy calls “the awful darkness within the world.” Global in its geography and written with great lyricism and power, Underland speaks powerfully to our present moment. Taking a deep-time view of our planet, Macfarlane here asks a vital and unsettling question: “Are we being good ancestors to the future Earth?” Underland marks a new turn in Macfarlane’s long-term mapping of the relations of landscape and the human heart. From its remarkable opening pages to its deeply moving conclusion, it is a journey into wonder, loss, fear, and hope. At once ancient and urgent, this is a book that will change the way you see the world.

"Deep Time: A Literary History challenges the exclusive association between deep time and the modern science of geology by focusing on late Enlightenment writings that used narrative form to integrate new empirical data and methods with Western and non-Western traditions of chronology, earth history, and human origins. Choosing the mid-eighteenth century as a starting point, Heringman aims to demonstrate how deep time became associated with Earth history in the first place, expanding its conceptual domain to include colonial natural history, oral tradition, and scientific romance-all frontiers of the expanded time horizons associated with modernity. It considers the conceptual opening of a modern geological timescale in literary, scientific, and travel writing in the late-Enlightenment/Romantic period, with chapters on the explorer-naturalist team of John Reinhold and George Forster, who sailed with Captain Cook (1772-1775); Buffon's protogeochronological Epochs of Nature (1778); Herder, Blake, and prehistory through oral tradition; and Charles Darwin's dialogue with anthropology and archaeology, especially in The Descent of Man (1871). When eighteenth- and nineteenth-century explorers, naturalists, poets, and philosophers wrote about the "abyss of time," they referred to a large and diverse set of new ideas that unsettled the established time scale: ideas about cultural evolution inspired by Pacific peoples recently encountered by James Cook and other voyagers; a new sense of the depth and diversity of the Earth's strata, produced by increased attention to their structure and deposition; the study of oral traditions by poets and scholars associated with the ballad revival; and the study of non-Western scriptures such as the Mahabharata, which calculated time on an entirely different scale. The latter two pursuits dovetailed with the investigations of voyagers from Johann Reinhold Forster to Charles Darwin, who sought to measure the age of non-European civilizations by way of the geological age of their environments. Ultimately, Heringman argues that the concept of deep time, now associated primarily with modern geology, "was a composite of human and natural history to begin with.""--

The dramatic history of planet Earth and the rocky road to understanding the past A probing account of the history of the earth and an introduction to the many eccentric characters that have attempted to understand its origins. Full of fascinating anecdotes about 19th century explorers and natural philosophers who first carved up Earth's history just as others were carving up the globe. Unravels the fascinating history of rock strata and the implications they have had on accepted theories on the Earth's life. Considers the future of the earth, and what a repeat of some of the catastrophic events of the earth's past, such as major earthquakes and asteroid collisions, could mean for life today.

What is the past? It is a time as well as a place. Acclaimed author Peter D. Ward describes the tools that contemporary scientists use to uncover facts about the past - terrain, climate, and the life forms that once inhabited this planet. Time Machines presents fascinating profiles of the deep past and the scientists who are making it come alive. "...for the general reader, Time Machines may be the most interesting book yet by the University of Washington prof..." -SEATTLE WEEKLY "For anyone interested in how and why as well as the what of paleontology, Time Machines is a must read."-AMERICAN SCIENTIST

What can long-dead dinosaurs teach us about our future? Plenty, according to paleontologist Kenneth Lacovara, who has discovered some of the largest creatures to ever walk the Earth. By tapping into the ubiquitous wonder that dinosaurs inspire, Lacovara weaves together the stories of our geological awakening, of humanity’s epic struggle to understand the nature of deep time, the meaning of fossils, and our own place on the vast and bountiful tree of life. Go on a journey––back to when dinosaurs ruled the Earth––to discover how dinosaurs achieved feats unparalleled by any other group of animals. Learn the secrets of how paleontologists find fossils, and explore quirky, but profound questions, such as: Is a penguin a dinosaur? And, how are the tiny arms of T. rex the key to its power and ferocity? In this revealing book, Lacovara offers the latest ideas about the shocking and calamitous death of the dinosaurs and ties their vulnerabilities to our own. Why Dinosaurs Matter is compelling and engaging—a great reminder that our place on this planet is both precarious and potentially fleeting. “As we move into an uncertain environmental future, it has never been more important to understand the past.”

From the author of lnsectopedia, a powerful exploration of loss, grief, endurance, and the absences that permeate the present. Unconformities are gaps in the geological record, physical evidence of breaks in time. For Hugh Raffles, these holes in history are also fissures in feeling, knowledge, memory, and understanding. In this endlessly inventive, riveting book, Raffles enters these gaps, drawing together threads of geology, history, literature, philosophy, and ethnography to trace the intimate connections between personal loss and world historical events, and to reveal the force of absence at the core of contemporary life. Through deeply researched explorations of Neolithic stone circles, Icelandic lava, mica from a Nazi concentration camp, petrified whale blubber in Svalbard, the marble prized by Manhattan's Lenape, and a huge Greenlandic meteorite that arrived in New York City along with six Inuit adventurers in 1897, Raffles shows how unconformities unceasingly incite human imagination and investigation yet refuse to conform, heal, or disappear. A journey across eons and continents, The Book of Unconformities is also a journey through stone: this most solid, ancient, and enigmatic of materials, it turns out, is as lively, capricious, willful, and indifferent as time itself.