"Sixty-six million years ago, an object the size of a city descended from space to crash into Earth, creating a devastating cataclysm that killed off the dinosaurs, along with three-quarters of the other species on the planet. What was its origin? In Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs, Lisa Randall proposes it was a comet that was dislodged from its orbit as the Solar System passed through a disk of dark matter embedded in the Milky Way. In a sense, it...

"Mary Anning was only 12 years old when she excavated the skeleton of an unknown animal. The discovery of the ichthyosaur was the dawn of a new age of science called paleontology, and Anning became one of the leading experts in the study of dinosaurs. Her discoveries helped lay the groundwork for Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and changed the way scientists understood the past. Unfortunately, as a woman of the 1800s, Anning received almost no...

Ecological competition began as slow arms races. Predators evolved to hunt. Prey evolved to defend themselves. Each improvement was small, barely shifting the odds of survival. Nature remained in equilibrium. Until the dawn of humanity. When our ancestors developed the unique ability to think up new devices and behaviors, humanity became able to overcome nature's defenses far more quickly than natural selection could respond. Humankind spread out...

Foreword by Matthew C. Lamanna New Afterword by Tom Rea Less than one hundred years ago, Diplodocus carnegii-named after industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie-was the most famous dinosaur on the planet. The most complete fossil skeleton unearthed to date, and one of the largest dinosaurs ever discovered, Diplodocus was displayed in a dozen museums around the world and viewed by millions of people. Bone Wars explains how a fossil unearthed...

Where do turtles hail from? Why and how did they acquire shells? These questions have spurred heated debate and intense research for more than two hundred years. Brilliantly weaving evidence from the latest paleontological discoveries with an accessible, incisive look at different theories of biological evolution and their proponents, Turtles as Hopeful Monsters tells the fascinating evolutionary story of the shelled reptiles. Paleontologist Olivier...

Hunting for fossils with a preeminent guide and teacher Michael Novacek, a world-renowned paleontologist who has discovered important fossils on virtually every continent, is an authority on patterns of evolution and on the relationships among extinct and extant organisms. Time Traveler is his captivating account of how his boyhood enthusiasm for dinosaurs became a lifelong commitment to vanguard science. He takes us with him as he discovers fossils...

Las respuestas de la ciencia a las preguntas fundamentales sobre el origen de la vida y el origen del ser humano. Desde las primeras bacterias -3.800 millones de años- y los primeros organismos, plantas y vertebrados, hasta la conquista de la tierra, la era de los dinosaurios, los mamíferos y la aparición de los homínidos en el mioceno hace 7 millones de años. ¿Son primas las ballenas y las vacas?, ¿Cómo eran las primeras formas de vida?,...