Palaeontology

The vertebrate fossil record extends back more than 500 million years, and bonebeds - localized concentrations of the skeletal remains of vertebrat...

The Triassic period is generally viewed as the beginning of the Age of Dinosaurs. For paleontologists, however, it also marks the rise of the world...

The vertebrate fossil record extends back more than 500 million years, and bonebeds - localized concentrations of the skeletal remains of vertebrat...

Although the species is one of the fundamental units of biological classification, there is remarkably little consensus among biologists about what...

Nineteenth-century paleontologists boasted that, shown a single bone, they could identify or even reconstruct the extinct creature it came from wit...

The desert has long been a theme in Mark C. Taylor’s work, from his inquiries into the religious significance of Las Vegas to his writings on earth...

As explorers and scientists have known for decades, the Neotropics harbor a fantastic array of our planet's mammalian diversity, from capybaras and...

On this blue planet, long before pterodactyls took to the skies and tyrannosaurs prowled the continents, tiny green organisms populated the ancient...

The so-called 'Bone Wars' of the 1880s, which pitted Edward Drinker Cope against Othniel Charles Marsh in a frenzy of fossil collection and discove...

John H. Ostrom’s expeditions to the Bighorn Basin of Wyoming and Montana in the 1960s resulted in discoveries and research that would change long-h...

Long after the extinction of dinosaurs, when humans were still in the stone age, woolly rhinos, mammoths, mastodons, sabertooth cats, giant ground ...

A classic work from the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History describing the mosasaurs, a group of large predatory marine lizards of the Mesozoic ...

Land bridges are the causeways of biodiversity. When they form, organisms are introduced into a new patchwork of species and habitats, forever alte...

Land bridges are the causeways of biodiversity. When they form, organisms are introduced into a new patchwork of species and habitats, forever alte...

Hans Thewissen, a leading researcher in the field of whale paleontology and anatomy, gives a sweeping first-person account of the discoveries that ...

This book focuses on how climatic change during the last fifteen million years—especially the last three million—has affected human evolution and o...

Rift basins of Triassic-Jurassic age that are associated with the breakup of the Pangean supercontinent contain an extraordinary record of the phys...

In some cases, scientific research into the space-time continuum may have [unexpected] consequences . . . as occurs in Isaac Asimov's short story "...

The transition from the Paleocene to the Eocene Epoch-approximately 55 million years ago-represents a critical moment in the earth's history, when ...

-- American Biology Teacher

This book is a comprehensive, chronologically ordered review of China's vertebrate fossil record. It also presents a history of vertebrate paleonto...

The eminent historian Richard Bushman here reflects on his faith and the history of his religion. By describing his own struggle to find a basis fo...

What light do fossils shed on the deep history of life's most diverse phylum, the Arthropoda? Are the interrelationships between major groups of ar...

Based on two decades of research, The Late Devonian Mass Extinction reviews the many theories that have been presented to explain the global mass e...

"It is not often that a work can literally rewrite a person's view of a subject. And this is exactly what Rudwick's book should do for many paleont...

Located at the southwest corner of Lake Turkana in northern Kenya, Lothagam represents one of the most important intervals in African prehistory. E...

Most nonscientists are usually aware of fossils, and it is commonly believed that they are extremely rare. In fact, fossils are exceptionally commo...

The long and distinguished tradition of tracking dinosaurs and other extinct animals in Europe dates back to the 1830s. Yet this venerable traditio...

The first English translation of Johannes Weigelt's 1927 classic makes available the seminal work in taphonomy, the study of how organisms die, dec...

Based on two decades of research, The Late Devonian Mass Extinction reviews the many theories that have been presented to explain the global mass e...

The first English translation of Johannes Weigelt's 1927 classic makes available the seminal work in taphonomy, the study of how organisms die, dec...

Most nonscientists are usually aware of fossils, and it is commonly believed that they are extremely rare. In fact, fossils are exceptionally commo...

Rift basins of Triassic-Jurassic age that are associated with the breakup of the Pangean supercontinent contain an extraordinary record of the phys...

"A rich historical pastiche of 17th- and 18th-century philosophy, science, and religion."—G. Y. Craig, New Scientist "This book, by a distinguished...

How did the earth look in prehistoric times? Scientists and artists collaborated during the years prior to the publication of Darwin's "Origin of S...

"Arguably the best work to date in the history of geology."—David R. Oldroyd, Science"After a superficial first glance, most readers of good will a...

Originally published in Germany in 1950, and now translated into English for the first time, "Basic Questions in Paleontology" has both historical ...

Until quite recently, French zoologist Georges Cuvier (1769-1832) opposed the biological theory of evolution, and championed the geological theory ...

The fascinating story of how a harsh terrain that resembled modern Antarctica has been transformed gradually into the forests, grasslands, and wetl...

Until quite recently, French zoologist Georges Cuvier (1769-1832) opposed the biological theory of evolution, and championed the geological theory ...

This is a behind-the-scenes look at the search for human origins, analyzing how the biases and preconceptions of paleoanthropologists shape their w...

By studying evolution across geological time, paleontologists gain a perspective that sometimes complements and sometimes conflicts with views base...

Evolutionary innovations—the bony skeleton of vertebrates, avian flight, or the insect pollination system of angiosperms, for example—have in recen...