Product Description
Digging in the badlands of Montana, workers from the Burpee Museum of Natural History have spent weeks hunting for fossils. On their last day of prospecting they make a great find: the toe bone of a meat-eating dinosaur! Judith Williams takes us on this adventure from the dig site to the creation and opening of the museum exhibit. The dinosaur named Jane is different from any found before and it s up to scientists at the museum to identify her. In cooperation with the Burpee Museum of Natural History, Enslow presents this featured title, packed with photographs from the expedition and new museum exhibit, Jane's World. This full-circle story supports the National Science Education Standards for Earth Science and Science as a Human Endeavor. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Great book for budding paleontologist
Even though this book has only a few illustrations (mostly photographs & maps, all excellent), the story of the discovery is so animated and interesting that even children as young as 4 can really become engaged in it.It is intended for an older audience of self-readers -- probably 3rd - 6th grade -- but if read aloud with enthusiasm, I know from experience that it can captivate much younger children too.No matter what your age, the author's excitement is irresistibly contagious.This would be an excellent gift for a child (4-12) who is interested in dinosaurs; and even if the child is not interested in dinosaurs yet, this book will certainly be an inspiration for him to want to find out more.It's also a great choice as preparation for a field trip to a natural history museum. ... Read more

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Profiles eight of the people whose study of dinosaurs has shaped the field of paleontology over the past two hundred years. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Bone Up On The Dinosaur Hunters
Reading Between The Bones: The Pioneers of Dinosaur Paleontology by Susan Clinton is not as good as Pioneers Of Geology, her more recent work written in collaboration with Margaret W. Carruthers [if that one is a 5 star book, this one should get 4.5 stars], but is still a very good book.The book covers an eclectic and excellent selection of paleontologists, starting with Georges Cuvier, the first paleontologist, and concludes with Jack Horner, a model for the paleontologist in the first Jurassic Park movie.I am glad Cuvier is included.Even though Cuvier was the first paleontologist and convinced the scientific community of the validity of extinctions, he is often vilified in geology texts as an unscientific Catastrophist. [This is a misrepresentation of Cuvier and the Catastrophists, who were not unscientific.They were just wrong about certain aspects of Earth history.]The section on Roy Chapman Andrews [a model for Indiana Jones] includes equal billing for Walter Granger, the paleontologist with the Central Asiatic Expeditions, which gives the reader a better idea of what went on during those classic expeditions to the deserts of Mongolia.The book includes a Geologic Time Scale, a good bibliography, and an index, but lacks a glossary.Reading Between The Bones would have benefitted from the subsections and subtitles used in Pioneers of Geology, which made the later book easier to read.My few reservations do not negate the fact that this book should be on the shelves in every elementary school and middle school library in the country and would be a killer gift for the budding dinosaur hunter, especially those who are not ready for the more advanced books written by Jack Horner and others.I recommend you dig up a copy of Reading Between The Bones. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Expanding Earth Reference
I was quite amazed that this author wrote fairly about the expanding earth hypothesis.Normally authors treat it as a passing fancy and bad science.I bought the book specifically for insight into this area and there are a dozen or more pages dedicated to this area.Congrats to the author for an "unbiased" view of expanding earth which in my opinion is absolutely correct.

Review of Transaction
Book was received in good time and in excellent condition.I am still reading the book, so cannot comment on it.The transaction was all I could wish. ... Read more

Product Description
Designed for use in conjunction with a variety of textbooks, but particularly with Boardman's "Fossil Invertebrates" , the manual provides exercises, tying palaeobiological concepts to an examination of fossil specimens. So that its use can be tailored to the fossil material available, the manual includes more exercises than will be required by most laboratory courses. Some exercises or their components may be omitted. The author's prime intention is to familiarize students with fossil taxonomy and morphology and to incorporate principles of paleobiology to demonstrate problems in historical geology and evolution for which fossils are useful. ... Read more

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The so-called “Bone Wars” of the 1880s, which pitted Edward Drinker Cope against Othniel Charles Marsh in a frenzy of fossil collection and discovery, may have marked the introduction of dinosaurs to the American public, but the second Jurassic dinosaur rush, which took place around the turn of the twentieth century, brought the prehistoric beasts back to life. These later expeditions—which involved new competitors hailing from leading natural history museums in New York, Chicago, and Pittsburgh—yielded specimens that would be reconstructed into the colossal skeletons that thrill visitors today in museum halls across the country.

Reconsidering the fossil speculation, the museum displays, and the media frenzy that ushered dinosaurs into the American public consciousness, Paul Brinkman takes us back to the birth of dinomania, the modern obsession with all things Jurassic. Featuring engaging and colorful personalities and motivations both altruistic and ignoble, The Second Jurassic Dinosaur Rush shows that these later expeditions were just as foundational—if not more so—to the establishment of paleontology and the budding collections of museums than the more famous Cope and Marsh treks. With adventure, intrigue, and rivalry, this is science at its most swashbuckling.

Customer Reviews (3)

Gotta read this book!!
For anyone interested in dinosaurs, paleontology, and/or history of science, this book is a must read. It reveals little known facts about the people, institutions, and techniques responsible for the first mounted sauropod dinosaurs in the United States and even the world. These characters are both ruthless and entertaining in the feverish race to be the first and to rewrite the history of paleontology. I highly encourage everyone to add "The Second Jurassic Dinosaur Rush" to the personal libraries.

Like a time machine
An exhaustively researched history of a formative time in Vertebrate Paleontology. Beyond being an entertaining record of the successes and frustrations of these early workers in the field, this book serves as an excellent resource for both modern paleontologists and the interested public to understand how the discipline was shaped. From discovery to display, we learn how a surplus of scientific curiosity, the tenacity to brave threatening weather and landscape, skill in the field, and an extraordinary amount of luck must combine to haul these beasts back by wagon and rail to the laboratories of the nation's great museums where they are brought back to life. A quote from Yale paleontologist Richard Swann Lull sums it up, "The old-time expeditions were staged in the real West, at a time when lack of means of transportation... together with the very intimate contact every fossil hunter must have with his physical surroundings- with fatigue, heat and cold, hunger and thirst- made the search for the prehistoric a real adventure suited to red-blooded men."

Having worked at several of the institutions and field areas featured within, and with senior generations of paleontologists who knew personally the major characters, this book has provided me with fascinating context and closer ties to the genesis of paleo as we know it today.

Wonderful Reading
The book is great and I am hooked.It's chock full of information, easy
to read and presented in a style I personally like.Treating the
characters as people who have histories, personal lives and opinions is
great.A behind the scenes look at turn of the century paleontology and a
must read for anyone interested in paleontology and dinosaurs. ... Read more

Product Description
Some 75 million years ago, one dinosaur ended its life. The dinosaur was an Albertosaurus -- distant cousin to the ferocious, meat-eating predator Tyrannosaurus Rex. But its death was also a beginning -- the start of its transformation into a fossil, which lay undiscovered for millennia until the forces of erosion brought the young dinosaur, once again, to light. ... Read more

Product Description
This is an EXACT reproduction of a book published before 1923. This IS NOT an OCR'd book with strange characters, introduced typographical errors, and jumbled words.This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ... Read more

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The gorgons ruled the world of animals long before there was any age of dinosaurs.They were the T. Rex of their day until an environmental cataclysm 250 million years ago annihilated them—along with 90 percent of all plant and animal species on the planet—in an event so terrible even the extinction of the dinosaurs pales in comparison. For more than a decade, Peter Ward and his colleagues have been searching in South Africa’s Karoo Desert for clues to this world: What were these animals like? How did they live and, more important, how did they die?

In Gorgon, Ward examines the strange fate of this little known prehistoric animal and its contemporaries, the ancestors of the turtle, the crocodile, the lizard, and eventually dinosaurs. He offers provocative theories on these mass extinctions and confronts the startling implications they hold for us. Are we vulnerable to a similar catastrophe? Are we nearing the end of human domination in the earth’s cycle of destruction and rebirth? Gorgon is also a thrilling travelogue of Ward’s long, remarkable journey of discovery and a real-life adventure deep into Earth’s history.Amazon.com Review
In Gorgon, geologist Peter Ward turns his attention reluctantly away from the asteroid collision that killed all the dinosaurs and instead focuses on a much older extinction event. As it turns out, the Permian extinction of 250 million years ago dwarfs the dino's 65-million-year-old Cretaceous-Tertiary armageddon. Ward's book is not a dry accounting of the fossil discoveries leading to this conclusion, but rather an intimate, first-person account of some of his triumphs and disappointments as a scientist. He draws a nice parallel between the Permian extinction and his own rather abrupt in research focus, revealing the agonizing steps he had to take to educate himself about a set of prehistoric creatures about which he knew almost nothing. These were the Gorgons, carnivorous reptiles whose ecological dominance preceded that of the more pop-culture-ready dinosaurs.

They would have had huge heads with very large, saberlike teeth, large lizard eyes, no visible ears, and perhaps a mixture of reptilian scales and tufts of mammalian hair.... The Gorgons ruled a world of animals that were but one short evolutionary step away from being mammals.

With characteristic enthusiasm, Ward transports readers with him to South Africa's Karoo desert, where he participated in field expeditions seeking fossils of these fearsome creatures. He suffers routine tick patrols, puff-adder avoidance lessons, stultifying thirst, and the everyday humiliations of being the new guy on a field team. Besides telling a fascinating paleological story, Gorgon lets readers feel a bone-hunter's passion and pain. --Therese Littleton ... Read more

Customer Reviews (27)

Nice and easy reading
Nice account of the hunt for fossils in the Karoo desert in south africa in the search of an explanation for the Permian/Triassic extinction. Combining down to earth paleontology, some explanations on the Permian/Triassic extinction, a description of the political transition in south Africa and a humble account of personal experience as a paleontolog the books makes an easy and nice reading.

So-so
Science books are pretty much susceptible to their times, and the early 2006 discovery of a huge crater in Antarctic Wilkes Land, which may have been four to five times the size of the K-T Impactor, seems to have given great credence to the belief that it was the primary, if not sole, cause of the P-T extinction event. Furthermore, unlike the K-T Impactor, there is growing evidence that the P-T Impactor may have actually broken the continent of Australia off from Antarctica, and led to the breakup of the ancient supercontinent of Gondwanaland. Given this turn of events, it might seem that Ward's book should be simply tossed on the heap of outdated science books, for he is not a great essayist in the manner of a Stephen Jay Gould, whose often wrong posits on evolution did not kybosh his ability to effectively communicate ideas, nor is Ward anywhere in a class with the magisterial Loren Eiseley, whose `hidden personal essay' format preceded Gould's, and whose work is one of the great English language prose corpuses of the last century, even if his decades old ideas on evolution are several generations removed from relevance.

Yet, here is where idiot luck comes in. While Ward is no prose stylist, and one almost feels he is a primitivist or idiot savant banging away at keyboards, he made one very smart decision in writing this book, or, at least, a fortuitous one, which was to make this book less about `hard science', and more about the soft stuff in between. Gorgon focuses far more on the personalities of scientists, the desires for relevance, the politics of the South African lands where the Karoo Desert digs that constitute this book's Ground Zero take place, and his own personal family ups and downs. Thus, what was a squooshy weakness before the Antarctic discovery, becomes the book's saving grace after it....Last year, I read a much more well written book called Snowball Earth, by Gabrielle Walker, which was everything this book wanted to be. It provided a provocative theory of an almost wholly glaciated earth a half billion years before this ancient impact, and it did so in a lively, engaging style that presented both its theory and personalities in an engaging, well-written style. This book, unfortunately, barely touches upon its own titular subject, which is really the reason most layfolk would buy it. We get too little of the gorgonopsians and too much of filler. This book won't be of much use in a decade or two, and Ward does not have a great future in science writing the way Walker does, but this book did give more than a few moments of pleasure in its slow meandering, which again recapitulated its ideas about drying Permian rivers, and will leave at least a few dried beds within that will occasionally urge me to rethink its lost waters. If this goes against my usual criteria for recommending a book, so be it. If a man can't be willfully dissonant, on rare occasions, does his usual consistency have any virtue? As for Mr. Ward, he can thank me at a later date.

Barely readable
The age of the creatures that predated the dinosaurs--the protomammals and their ilk--is a fascinating and little-known chapter in the history of life on earth, and I was interested in learning more about these creatures. So I bought this book.

I shouldn't have.

Not only did I learn nothing, the book is truly painful to read. Ward's style swings from jaw-poppingly boring "what I did on my summer vacation" accounts rendered in grindingly banal prose to incomprehensible science jargon, sometimes in the same paragraph.

Along the way, he manages to get in some cheap shots at colleagues, congratulate himself for having solved the mystery of the dinosaurs' extinction--and, oh, by the way, having figured out what killed the Gorgons and their kin, too--and indulge in a bit of handwringing over apartheid in South Africa, where he did his digging.

Which is laudable, certainly, but what it has to do with paleontology is beyond me.

But most perturbing is that at no point does the reader learn anything of substance about the creatures themselves. Nope, nothing. Zip. Nada. Bubkes. Don't believe me? Take a look at the index. The actual Gorgons--the gorgonopsids--the creatures for whom the book is named--appear on--wait for it--11 pages. Out of 288 pages, they merit mention on 11.

The interested layperson would do a heck of a lot better to read Robert Bakker's "The Dinosaur Heresies," which is far more accessible, far better written, far more significant, and far less smug. And by the way, you'll also learn more about the protomammals in Bakker's book than you will in "Gorgon."

If I want badly written and indulgent memoirs, I'll read the New Yorker. Since I'm still interested in learning more about the Gorgons, I guess I'll keep looking.

Now I want to be a geologist
I ordered this book used but it came in perfect condition. I had been reading a library copy but it was two weeks overdue. This book has captured my intrest like no other non-fiction book ever has. I want to be a geologist or a paleontolgist now!

Monsters of the Permian
By now, almost everyone must be familiar with the discovery of the iridium concentrations at the K-T (Cretaceous-Tertiary) boundary, and the Chicxulub impact crater, first reported in 1981, that appears to exactly the right age and the right size to have terminated most of the life on Earth, sixty-five million years ago.The author of "Gorgon" began his career with field work on the proof of the quick and terrible extinction at the K-T boundary--the death knell of the dinosaurs.

However, Dr. Ward found himself more and more intrigued by an even great extinction event that occurred 250 million years ago at the boundary of the Permian and the Triassic (P/T).Was it caused by another comet or meteor strike?Did the elimination of 95 % of Earth's marine life and 70% of all land species proceed as quickly as at the K-T termination, or did it take place in pulses over a much longer period of time?

According to the author (and others), there is no credible, unambiguous evidence for an impact as is the case for the K-T extinction.What is more likely is that massive greenhouse gas emissions reduced oxygen availability, ultimately resulting in the collapse of marine ecosystems, and most of the land-based systems as well.This was possibly caused by volcanic eruptions on the supercontinent of Pangea, in what is now Siberia (the Siberian Traps).

In the final chapter of his book, "Resolution," the author puts forth two interesting observation-based theories:(1) the abundance of oxidized, reddish rock in the Triassic beds above the P/T boundary (about 50 million years worth) implies "...the oxygen in our atmosphere plunged to very low levels as it became tied up in the rocks...so low, in fact, that any poor human...would very quickly suffer from altitude sickness, even at sea level."; (2) on land at least, the near extinction of animals that didn't use oxygen efficiently, including most but not all of the mammal-like reptiles that dominated the Permian."Heat [greenhouse effect] and asphyxiation [were] the two agents of the long mysterious mass extinction."

Except for the last chapter, "Gorgon" is light on theory and heavy on field work and proof-of-concept.Here is how geologists, paleontologists, and other scientists interact in the field, braving the heat of South Africa's Karoo Desert, the omnipresent ticks, flies, and puff adders, and the digestive challenges of bad water and mystery-meat pizza.Dr. Ward takes his readers not only on a trip through the lost world of the Permian, but also through an African culture that seems to be on the brink of chaos.He is a sensitive and at times acerbic observer of both present and deep past."Gorgon" is a compelling, thoroughly readable story.
... Read more

Product Description

This book offers a thorough and up-to-date treatment of the use of morphometric procedures in a wide variety of contexts. As one of the most dynamic and popular fields on the contemporary biological scene, morphometrics is gaining notice among researchers and students as a necessary complement to molecular studies in the understanding and maintenance of biodiversity. This is the first reference to meet that growing need.

Product Description

The Chesapeake Miocene will always be considered a paleontological treasure. Given the richness and accessibility of the Maryland and Virginia Miocene shell beds, it seems remarkable that very few people have ever described new species from these strata over the past 185 years. Until now. Integrating elements from paleontology, geology, environmental science, and ecology, Molluscan Paleontology of the Chesapeake Miocene assembles previous research and the authors’ experience into a synoptic field guide.

The most complete compendium of Miocene species created since 1904, this long-awaited resource lists nearly 500 species. It contains illustrations of 260 species, including more than 60 not found in any previous book and 26 newly discovered. It describes Chesapeake molluscan faunas in terms of local geology, paleoceanography, and marine paleobiology. Organized by stratigraphic geology, the book covers fossils of the Eastover, St Mary’s, Choptank, and Calvert Formations. It illustrates 24 collecting sites and fossil exposures, showing details of in situ specimens, along with maps of 4 Miocene paleoseas and detailed stratigraphic columns for Maryland and northern Virginia. The text is accompanied by a CD-ROM with color illustrations of the forty known species of ecphora shells. Armed with these, you should be able to identify the species found in the amazingly rich shell beds of the Chesapeake Bay area.