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THE RISE & FALL OF THE DINOSAURS

A NEW HISTORY OF A LOST WORLD

BY STEVE BRUSATTE – PALEONTOLOGIST & AUTHOR

The fifth installment of the Jurassic Park film series hits theaters this summer. And already the forthcoming summer blockbuster, JURASSIC WORLD: FALLEN KINGDOM, has over 48 million views on YouTube!!

Dinosaurs have always fascinated humans – so much so that books, TV shows and movies are written about them even to this day! And dinosaurs fossils remain enduringly popular at natural history museums and often sell for millions of dollars at auction!

YET – despite their grip on the public imagination, – most of us know very little about the fascinating history of these astonishing creatures!!

Enter STEVE BRUSATTE, one of the most accomplished young paleontologists in the world today. Brusatte has emerged as a star in the field, naming 15 new species and leading groundbreaking scientific studies on how dinosaurs rose to dominance and went extinct!

Now, the new book – THE RISE AND FALL OF THE DINOSAURS: A NEW HISTORY OF A LOST WORLD- Brusatte gives an ambitious and engrossing narrative history that spans more than 200 million years,!

Brusatte tells the complete, true, and surprising story of the life, reign, and death of the dinosaurs.

On April 24, William Morrow will publish THE RISE AND FALL OF THE DINOSAURS: A NEW HISTORY OF A LOST WORLD by STEVE BRUSATTE. This sweeping scientific history – the only one of its kind – tells the epic story of the dinosaurs, examining their origins, their habitats, their extinction, and their living legacy.

Author STEVE BRUSATTE traces their inauspicious origins from small shadow dwellers – themselves the beneficiaries of a mass extinction caused by volcanic eruptions at the beginning of the Triassic period – into the dominant array of species every wide-eyed child memorizes today, T. Rex, Triceratops, Brontosaurus, and more. This gifted scientist and writer recreates the dinosaurs’ heyday during the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, when thousands of species thrived, and winged and feathered dinosaurs, the prehistoric ancestors of modern birds, emerged. The story continues to the end of the Cretaceous period (66 million years ago), when a giant asteroid or comet struck the planet and nearly every dinosaur species (but not all!) died out, in the most extraordinary extinction event in the earth’s history, one full of lessons for today as we confront a “sixth extinction.”

Along the way, Brusatte recalls compelling stories from his globe-trotting journey studying these legendary beasts during one of the most exciting eras in dinosaur research and offers thrilling accounts of some of the remarkable findings he and his colleagues have made, including primitive human-sized tyrannosaurs, monstrous carnivores even larger than T. rex, and feathered raptors from China.

Including more than 70 original illustrations and photographs, this electrifying scientific history will be the definitive book on the subject for years to come and is sure to appeal to readers who enjoyed popular science books like Sapiens, Your Inner Fish, The Sixth Extinction, and I Contain Multitudes. As Brusatte writes, “The rise and fall of the dinosaurs is an incredible story, of a time when giant beasts and other fantastic creatures made the world their own. They walked on the very ground below us, their fossils now entombed in rock – the clues that tell this story. To me, it’s one of the greatest narratives in the history of our planet.”

Among the insights and recent discoveries Brusatte elaborates on in the book:

· Today is the “golden age of paleontology”:

· Feathered Dinosaurs – a.k.a. modern birds are dinosaurs

· Dinosaurs were colorful creatures – literally

· Dinosaur’s extraordinary intelligence newly revealed

· Dinosaurs were bigger and faster than we thought

· Dinosaur’s humble origins:

· New insights into how tyrannosaurs became king

· Dinosaur extinction – lessons for our own time and our future?:

For more information: https://vimeo.com/242659265/f08885ce90

About the author: STEVE BRUSATTE is a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh. A graduate of the University of Chicago, he completed his doctorate at Columbia University. He writes frequently for Scientific American, including the May 2015 cover story on the evolution of tyrannosaurs. His academic research has been published by leading journals including Science and Nature (“Untangling the dinosaur family tree,” November 2017), and he authored a leading paleontology textbook, Dinosaur Paleobiology. He is also the “resident paleontologist” for BBC’s Walking with Dinosaurs program. A native of the Chicago area, he now lives in Edinburgh with his wife, Anne.

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