Weird Dinosaurs
The Strange New Fossils Challenging Everything We Thought We Knew
-
-
5.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- $12.99
-
- $12.99
Publisher Description
We’re in a golden age of discovery – and the fossils coming to light show dinosaurs were stranger, bigger, scarier and more diverse than we ever imagined.
From outback Australia to the Gobi Desert and the savanna of Madagascar, award-winning science writer John Pickrell sets out on a world tour of new discoveries and meets the fossil hunters leading the charge. Discover the dwarf dinosaurs unearthed by an eccentric Transylvanian baron, an aquatic, crocodile-snouted carnivore bigger than T. rex, the Chinese dinosaur with wings like a bat, and a Patagonian sauropod so enormous it was heavier than two commercial jet airliners.
Why did dinosaurs grow so huge? Did they all have feathers? And what do sauropods have in common with 1950s vacuum cleaners? Weird Dinosaurs examines the latest breakthroughs and new technologies radically transforming our understanding of the distant past.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Pickrell (Flying Dinosaurs), editor of Australian Geographic, dishes more dirt on dinosaurs, focusing as much attention on the humans who scour the Earth in search of dinosaur fossils as he does on the fossils themselves. Some of his stories are fascinating, such as his account of how Transylvanian aristocrat Franz Baron Nopcsa von Felso -Szilv s moved between hunting for dinosaur bones in Romania and serving as a spy in Ottoman Albania while plotting to be named king of Albania, but others are somewhat pedestrian. Each of Pickrell's 11 chapters focuses on a geographical region and catalogues the specimens found there, with a majority of the attention paid to the latest discoveries. Readers learn of beautiful opalised dinosaur bones from Australia and a crested dinosaur found approximately 13,000 feet up Antarctica's Mt. Kirkpatrick, demonstrating that dinosaurs were widely distributed across the globe. Unlike his previous book, this one doesn't offer much insight into the evolution of behavior or anatomy, though he does touch on the evolution of feathers and extremely long necks in sauropods. Despite the title, the dinosaurs Pickrell discusses don't seem that weird, but given that the "rate of discovery has been increasing nearly exponentially," something more strange is bound to appear soon. Illus.
