Kategoria BISAC: Science >> Paleontology

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...

The large, quadrupedal herbivores known as sauropods were widespread around the planet from the Jurassic to the end of the Cretaceous. With the longest necks and tails of all of the dinosaurs, some sauropods were 40 meters in length and weighed upwards of 100,000 kilograms, more than 20 tons. The popular image of these lumbering giants, placidly consuming ferns has been greatly revised in recent years. New discoveries and new theories about behavior and physiology have continued to enrich the study of these remarkable beasts. This book presents 21 new studies of the sauropods. The book is...

Call them "mudpuppies," "hellbenders," or "mud eels," salamanders are puzzling animals to most people. They come in forms that look like flattened fish with legs, like eels, like slimy lizards, or like lizards with toad-like skins. Their life history imitates the ancient evolutionary transition from aquatic to terrestrial vertebrates, though several groups remain permanently aquatic. Until now, no one has written about their ancient ancestors. Holman details the process of the identification and interpretation of the fossils. He presents a detailed systematic account of the known fossil...

Horns and Beaks completes Ken Carpenter's series on the major dinosaur types. As with his volumes on armored, carnivorous, and sauropodomorph dinosaurs, this book collects original and new information, reflecting the latest discoveries and research on these two groups of animals. The Ornithopods include Iguanodon, one of the first dinosaurs ever discovered and analyzed, and perhaps the most common and best-documented group, the hadrosaurs or "duckbilled dinosaurs." The Ceratopsians include Triceratops, known for its distinctive three-horned skull and protective collar.

Contributors...

New discoveries of ancient vertebrates, filling in gaps in the fossil record, are quickly eroding the traditionally recognized differences between the principal groups of vertebrates for example, between dinosaurs and birds and radically changing our understanding of the evolutionary history of the major group of animals to which our species belongs. This book describes this changing scientific landscape and contributes to the revolution in our knowledge of the developmental mechanisms that underlie evolutionary transformation.

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This volume presents state-of-the-art papers on important topics and methods in the analysis of vertebrate microfossil assemblages. The minute remains of animals and plants have proven very useful to paleontologists as tools for dating large fossils, describing the environments which existed at the time the fossils were deposited, and identifying and mapping the extent of local floras and faunas, among other things. Due to the large sample sizes that can be obtained, the chance to recover rare taxa is much higher than it is during a search for skeletal remains. Analysis of the data...

Phylogenetic analysis and morphometrics have been developed by biologists into rigorous analytic tools for testing hypotheses about the relationships between groups of species. This book applies these tools to paleontological data.

The fossil record is our one true chronicle of the history of life, preserving a set of macroevolutionary patterns; thus various hypotheses about evolutionary processes can be tested in the fossil record using phylogentic analysis and morphometrics.

The first book of its type, Fossils, Phylogeny, and Form will be useful in...

"A superb introduction to paleontology as it really is and how it is done, from fish to dinosaur, bird, and mammal." --Edward O. Wilson

Michael Novacek, a 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. Novacek writes of the alluring perils of fieldwork with affection and discernment, and he...