Archeologia

The Ecology of the Cambrian Radiation offers a comprehensive and surprising picture of the Earth at that ancient time. The book contains contributions from thirty-three authors hailing from ten countries and will be...

Evolutionary paleoecology is not a new discipline. Beginning with Darwin, researchers have attempted to understand how the...

Evolutionary paleoecology is not a new discipline. Beginning with Darwin, researchers have attempted to understand how the...

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The book describes the increasingly highly resolved stratigraphy into which all available temporally significant data and applications are integrated. Extensive temporal coverage includes the Lancian part of the...

"An important book at a time when the booming illicit trade in African antiquities and the despoiling of some of the continent s prime archeological sites generate little concern in the art world." Foreign Affairs

"This benchmark publication challenges all of us to be part of the solution. Plundering Africa s Past cannot help but raise the level of discourse and consciousness about the looting problem, what needs to be done to stop it and about the relationship between Africa and the West." African Studies Review

"Plundering Africa s Past should be required reading for all...

This volume presents the results of a systematic study of the ruins of the large Roman courtyard villa at Castle Copse, located near the village of Great Bedwyn, in southwest England. These efforts have shed light not only on the history of the villa itself, but also on the shifting focus of power over the course of a millennium at the sites associated with Castle Copse in the immediate region the Iron Age hillfort of Chisbury, a post-Roman settlement, and a Saxon village destined to become an urban center.

In addition to a complete survey of the site, its topography, geology,...

Toward the end of the Age of Dinosaurs, during a time known as the Late Cretaceous, a new type of giant predator appeared along the southern coasts of North America. It was a huge species of crocodylian called Deinosuchus. Neither a crocodile nor an alligator, it was an ancestor of both modern groups; it reached weights of many tons and it had some features unique to its own species. Average-sized individuals were bigger than the carnivorous dinosaurs with which they co-existed; the largest specimens were the size of a T-rex. King of the Crocodylians, the biography of these giant beasts,...

From 1907 to 1931 at Tendaguru, a remote site in present-day Tanzania, teams of German (and later British) paleontologists unearthed 220 tons of fossils, including the bones of a new dinosaur, one of the largest then known. For decades the mounted skeleton of this giant, Brachiosaurus, was the largest skeleton of a land animal on exhibit in the world. The dinosaur and other animal fossils found at Tendaguru form one of the cornerstones of our understanding of life in the Mesozoic era. Visited sporadically during the '30s and '40s, Tendaguru again became the site of scientific interest late...

This book gathers the findings of a number of studies on North American cave paleontology. Although not intended to be all-inclusive, Ice Age Cave Faunas of North America contains contributions that range from overviews of the significance of cave fossils to reports about new localities and studies of specific vertebrate groups. These essays describe how cave remains record the evolutionary patterns of organisms and their biogeography, how they can help reconstruct past ecosystems and climatic fluctuations, how they provide an important record of the evolution of modern ecosystems, and...

Over millions of years, Australia's unique biodiversity has produced a large cabinet of curiosities. Among the weirder members of this group were the Mihirungs, members of the now extinct family Dromornithidae. Made up of several genera of flightless birds-among them one of the very largest birds that ever lived-the dromornithids ranged from 60-kilogram beasts, 1.5 meters tall, to giants twice that size, weighing nearly half a metric ton. They were, by orders of magnitude, the largest "geese" that ever lived. One species was comparable in size to the Ele-phantbird of Madagascar and the...

Just 50,000 years ago the world was filled with fabulous creatures that are now forever gone. Australia's giant lizard, Megalania, was one of those. These frightful beasts could reach 19 feet in length and weigh as much as a polar bear. On their home turf they were top dog, and it was the rare animal that dared to challenge them. Dragons in the Dust tells the story of these amazing lizards and the world in which they lived. The book explores the Pleistocene, the time of the ice ages. While mammals ruled elsewhere, in Australia reptiles held their dominance. Large monitor lizards survive to...