Автор: коллектив
Издательство: DK CHILDREN
Год издания: 2011
isbn: 0756682304
Количество страниц: 304
Язык: english
Формат: PDF
This latest edition in a range of super successful DK encyclopedias for children features hundreds of photographs and computer generated images bringing extinct animals back to life in this visual celebration of early life on Earth. Authoritative yet accessible, the book includes fact boxes, timelines, maps, and diagrams that explore the beginnings of life on Earth, investigates early eras and life forms, and examines the world of the dinosaurs...their homes, food, young, and family lives. With content that is completely up to date and includes the latest discoveries and interpretations of prehistoric life, this is a comprehensive exploration of dinosaurs during their 180 million plus years of existence.
Автор: Gregory S. Paul
Издательство: University Press
Год издания: 2010
isbn: 069113720X
Количество страниц: 320
Язык: english
Формат: PDF
This lavishly illustrated volume is the first authoritative dinosaur book in the style of a field guide. World-renowned dinosaur illustrator and researcher Gregory Paul provides comprehensive visual and textual coverage of the great Mesozoic animals that gave rise to the living dinosaurs, the birds. Incorporating the new discoveries and research that are radically transforming what we know about dinosaurs, this book is distinguished both by its scientific accuracy and the quality and quantity of its illustrations. It presents thorough descriptions of more than 735 dinosaur species and features more than 600 color and black-and-white images, including unique skeletal drawings, "life" studies, and scenic views--illustrations that depict the full range of dinosaurs, from small, feathered creatures to whale-sized supersauropods. Heavily illustrated species accounts of the major dinosaur groups are preceded by an extensive introduction that covers dinosaur history and biology, the extinction of nonavian dinosaurs, the origin of birds, and the history of dinosaur paleontology--and that also gives a taste of what it might be like to travel back to the time of the dinosaurs.
Автор: R. T. J. Moody, E. Buffetaut
Издательство: Geological Society
Год издания: 2010
isbn: 1862393117
Количество страниц: 352
Язык: english
Формат: PDF
The discovery of dinosaurs and other large extinct saurians - a term under which the Victorians commonly lumped ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, pterosaurs and their kin - makes exciting reading and has caught the attention of palaeontologists, historians of science and the general public alike. The papers in this collection go beyond the familiar tales about famous fossil hunters and focus on relatively little-known episodes in the discovery and interpretation (from both a scientific and an artistic point of view) of dinosaurs and other inhabitants of the Mesozoic world. They cover a long time span, from the beginnings of modern scientific palaeontology in the 1700s to the present, and deal with many parts of the world, from the Yorkshire coast to Central India, from Bavaria to the Sahara. The characters in these stories include professional palaeontologists and geologists (some of them well-known, others quite obscure), explorers, amateur fossil collectors, and artists, linked together by their interest in Mesozoic creatures.
Автор: Michael Novacek
Издательство: Doubleday
Год издания: 1996
isbn: Язык: Английский 0385477740
Количество страниц: 367
Язык: english
Формат: PDF
Over the past six years, Michael Novacek, Dean of Science at the American Museum of Natural History, has led a team of international scientists to Mongolia's Gobi Desert on the greatest dinosaur expedition of the late twentieth century. Closed to the West since the 1920s and opened only to Michael Novacek's team, the remote sands of the Gobi Desert constitute the richest fossil site in the world. In Dinosaurs of the Flaming Cliffs, Novacek takes the reader along with his team as he re-creates the day-to-day drama of field exploration over the last six years and recounts the remarkable discoveries that he and his colleagues unearthed. Following early years of relative disappointment, in 1993 the expedition discovered the richest Cretaceous dinosaur site ever found, excavating fossils that have helped to reshape our understanding of the dinosaur and early mammal era. Interweaving the adventure of field research with chapters that offer in depth discussions on contemporary dinosaur research and science, Dinosaurs of the Flaming Cliffs makes for the best kind of science--an engrossing narrative that brings compellingly to life the thrill and excitement of scientific discovery.
Автор: Adrienne Mayor
Издательство: Princeton University Press
Год издания: 2005
isbn: 0691113459
Количество страниц: 488
Язык: english
Формат: PDF
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.