The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World

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Let's cover the positives first. As an overview of 150 million years or more of dinosaur evolution, from their earliest emergence to their eventual extinction (or rather near-extinction, since, as Brusatte is at pains to point out, modern birds are the dinos' direct descendants), the book does exactly what it's supposed to. Once-hazy (for me) details about the prehistoric timeline, the evolutionary family tree, and the mechanics of extinction came into clearer focus, and there were a lot of great factoids and details I never learned (and which, for that matter, probably weren't even known yet) during my childhood dino phase.

I was a dinosaur obsessed kid. I watched the entire Land Before Time series, many many times, and would rewatch BBC's Walking with Dinosaurs so often that I can still quote large segments of it verbatim despite not having watched it for over a decade.This book covers from the period of Earth's history, before the first true dinosaurs came into play, all the way up to their extinction. It's absolutely fascinating! I have truly learned so much. You learn about plant life, Pangaea, how the world changed, about animals that lived among the dinosaurs, what the weather was like, the different environments, and so much more. It also contains first person accounts from the author's life, about his adventures fossil hunting around the globe with colleagues and teachers, as well as him studying and cataloging fossils with other scientists. The heights to which dinosaurs rose were dizzying, which made their destruction all the more precipitous. They had been at the apex for millions of years, and then they were gone. Just like that. There is a lesson for humanity in this breathtaking turn of fortune, a lesson in humility. We think that we have achieved dominion over the world and mastery over nature. We think our place at the mountaintop is secure. We think – as a species – that we’ll be around forever. Likely, the dinosaurs thought that too. Brusatte says that Prorotodactylus was a small, house-cat–sized, quadrupedal archosaur, belonging to the animal line from which dinosaurs allegedly came. It walked in an upright fashion with arms and legs directly underneath the body, as opposed to sprawled out beneath the body. The other thing that I still can't quite get my head around was how long ago they lived on earth - millions of years, hard to comprehend that it was so long ago and that their fossils are still being found today. Wow!

The subsequent answer amounts to that other animals, such as mammals, being smaller and having more omnivorous diets, were able to hide in burrows and eat a greater variety of food. Or crocodiles being able to hide in aquatic ecosystems close to land, and birds being able to lay and hatch their eggs in about half the time of the dinosaurs. Dinosaurs apparently had none of these advantages, so died. That is the disappointing sum totality of the evidence provided. But, of course, dinosaurs didn’t really die out; part of their empire remains.If you want to know about Dinosaurs, including so much emerging research you definitely would not have heard about before I do recommend this - but go into it with a huge grain of salt because the author was A Lot in my opinion. I couldn't skip his personal stories on the audiobook, but I would do that if you're reading physically. Brusatte also recalls compelling stories from his globe-trotting expeditions during one of the most exciting eras in dinosaur research—which he calls “a new golden age of discovery”—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 paradigm-shifting feathered raptors from China.