Overview

This book opens a doorway to a fascinating former world, the dinosaurs and other animals that lived there, and how that world was brought to light. This world existed in Australia between 100 million and 120 million years ago, when Australia was far south of where it is located today and joined to Antarctica. Over the past two decades, it has been determined that in this polar region lived dinosaurs. This book tells the story of the discoveries that led to this surprising conclusion, of the dinosaurs and other animals that lived here, their environment, and how they adapted to this unusual place. How we have come to know about this lost world, so different from any that exists on Earth today, makes for a fascinating story. The book recounts the efforts to collect the fossils indispensable to our knowledge of this realm. It describes the work carried out in the laboratory to uncover the secrets of these fossils and to reconstruct the environment their living, breathing owners once inhabited. It describes the activities of hundreds of individual personalities who helped shaped the outcome. It is a journey of scientific adventure, full of the ambiguities of life that begins with one destination in mind and ends at another, having arrived by a most roundabout route, down byways and dead ends. It is, in short, an account of the way scientific research is actually conducted and the hard won knowledge that has been gained about this remarkable life of the past.

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9780253337733

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Reviews

""Australia is not fertile ground for dinosaurs, but Tom Rich and his wife Pat Vickers-Rich have made the most of the sparse fossil record. Their finds have shown that small dinosaurs stayed active through the long winter darkness when Australia was near the South Pole, 100 million years ago. The heart of their tale is the long, hard, work of excavating fossil deposits along the wave-battered coast... The hard work brought both discoveries and camaraderie, plus tales to be told around the campfire ... ""--New Scientist, 11 November 2000 "" ... this book shoul appeal not only to a large number of 'dinosaur groupies', but also to those interested in exploration and discovery.""--The Palaeontological Association Newsletter, Number 47, 2001

Australia is not fertile ground for dinosaurs, but Tom Rich and his wife Pat Vickers-Rich have made the most of the sparse fossil record. Their finds have shown that small dinosaurs stayed active through the long winter darkness when Australia was near the South Pole, 100 million years ago. The heart of their tale is the long, hard, work of excavating fossil deposits along the wave-battered coast... The hard work brought both discoveries and camaraderie, plus tales to be told around the campfire ... --New Scientist, 11 November 2000 ... this book shoul appeal not only to a large number of 'dinosaur groupies', but also to those interested in exploration and discovery. --The Palaeontological Association Newsletter, Number 47, 2001

Author Information

THOMAS H. RICH is Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology at Museum Victoria in Melbourne and co-author (with Patricia Vickers-Rich) of Wildlife of Gondwana: Dinosaurs and Other Vertebrates from the Ancient Supercontinent, also published by Indiana University Press. PATRICIA VICKERS-RICH hold a Chair in Paleontology at Monash University, where she lectures in the Earth Sciences department.

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