The landscape of southwestern Wyoming around the ghost town of Fossil is beautiful but harsh; a dry, high mountain desert with cool nights and long, cold winters inhabited by a sparse mountain desert community. But during the early Eocene, more than fifty million years ago, it was a subtropical lake, surrounded by volcanoes and forests and teeming with life. Buried within the sun-baked limestone is spectacular evidence of the lush vegetation and plentiful fauna of the ancient past, a transitional ecosystem giving us clues to how North America recovered from a great extinction event that wiped out dinosaurs and the majority of all species on the planet. Paleontologists have been conducting excavations at Fossil Butte for more than 150 years, and with The Lost World of Fossil Lake, one of the world’s leading experts on the fossils from this spectacular locality takes readers on a fascinating journey through the history of the discovery and exploration of the site. Deftly mixing incredible color photographs of the remarkable fossils uncovered at the site with an explanation of their evolutionary significance, Grande presents an unprecedented, comprehensive portrait of the site, its treasures, and what we’ve learned from them. Grande presents a broad range of fossilized organisms from Fossil Lake—from single-celled algae to palm trees to crocodiles—and together they make this long-extinct community come to life in all its diversity and splendor. A field guide and atlas round out the book, enabling readers to identify and classify the majority of the known fossils from the site. Lavishly produced in full color, The Lost World of Fossil Lake is a stunning reminder of the intellectual and physical beauty of scientific investigation—and a breathtaking window onto our planet’s long-lost past.

Fishes have a unique evolutionary history that stretches back in time more than 450 million years. They are incredibly ancient-older than the dinosaurs-and include the ancestors of all limbed vertebrates living on land, even humans.In Discovering Fossil Fishes , John Maisey traces the evolution of fishes over the course of nearly half a billion years, describing the discovery of their extraordinary fossil remains and explaining what these ancient animals tell us about our own place in the history of life. Combining current scientific information with entertaining tales about historic and contemporary fieldwork, Maisey brings to life the development of armored fishes, monster sharks, and fishes with arms as he reveals the subtleties of evolution's greatest success story.More abundant and more diverse than their air-breathing cousins, fishes today dominate the seas and freshwaters of Earth. Through outstanding full-color photographs of their fossils and of fossil reconstructions by artists David Miller and Ivy Rutzky, along with informative photographs, charts, diagrams, and drawings, we discover a staggering half-billion-year history in which lies our own watery origins.

Reimagining Dinosaurs argues that transatlantic popular literature was critical for transforming the dinosaur into a cultural icon between 1880 and 1920

Walk in the footsteps of the first fossil researchers to discover the earliest animal life on Earth. Explore whether dinosaurs had scales, fur, or feathers. Find out how fish learned to walk. This lively history combines storytelling with science to bring to life incredible creatures that once walked the Earth--the hallucigenia (a creature without tail or head), the tiktaalik (a walking fish), the plesiosaur (a peaceful sea dragon), and many more. Told with illustrations, comics, and facts, it shows how fossils tell a fascinating story about our oldest known species and how scientific thinking evolves.

Because fossil plants are found worldwide, the book can be used in many areas other than the western United States.