Publisher’s Thoughts:

The dinosaurs. Sixty-six million years ago, the Earth’s most fearsome creatures vanished. Today they remain one of our planet’s great mysteries. Now The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs reveals their extraordinary, 200-million-year-long story as never before.

In this captivating narrative (enlivened with more than seventy original illustrations and photographs), Steve Brusatte, a young American paleontologist who has emerged as one of the foremost stars of the field—naming fifteen new species and leading groundbreaking scientific studies and fieldwork—masterfully tells the complete, surprising, and new history of the dinosaurs, drawing on cutting-edge science to dramatically bring to life their lost world and illuminate their enigmatic origins, spectacular flourishing, astonishing diversity, cataclysmic extinction, and startling living legacy. Captivating and revelatory, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs is a book for the ages.

Brusatte traces the evolution of dinosaurs from their inauspicious start as 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 re-creates the dinosaurs’ peak during the Jurassic and Cretaceous 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, 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 earth’s history, one full of lessons for today as we confront a “sixth extinction.”

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.

An electrifying scientific history that unearths the dinosaurs’ epic saga, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs will be a definitive and treasured account for decades to come.

Staff Thoughts:

I am a lifelong, enthusiastic, exuberant dinosaur nerd. I probably missed my calling as a paleontologist, but that doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy keeping up with the field. Hence, I was thrilled this summer when I stumbled over The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs. I haven’t been following new discoveries as closely as I used to, and I was excited to get caught up on what I had missed. Brusatte’s book did not disappoint.

In The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs, Brussatte skillfully weaves the history of paleontology, the tale of his own career, and the history of dinosaurs themselves into a compelling and often entertaining narrative that is easy to lose yourself in. Telling the story of the dinosaurs from before they even existed, he deftly paints a picture of the prehistoric environments and how they changed as the continents shifted over millennia. Throughout the book, he continues to share the tale of how dinosaurs fought their way to the top of the ecosystem, their near collapse in the Triassic, their revival in the Jurassic, and their continued evolution and advancement into the Cretaceous.

He paints vivid pictures of their daily lives, behavior, and even how they moved and looked, right up until the day the asteroid struck. These dinosaurs are not the ones of old; they are birdlike, quick, intelligent, complex creatures, many covered in feathers. Brusatte’s own illustrations and photographs of fossils and other dinosaur hunters pepper the book, further bringing his descriptions to life.

Alongside the story of the dinosaurs themselves, Brusatte shares how paleontology itself has grown and evolved as a scientific discipline, largely due to a combination of large personalities and exciting, field-altering discoveries. (Feather imprints around dinosaur fossils, for example). He delves into how modern scientific tools are shaping the field, including computer modeling and the use of morphological disparity measurements to track the evolution of different dinosaur species.

He shares his personal journey as well, from a dinosaur-obsessed adolescent to a motivated undergraduate to a world-traveling paleontologist.  His tale is not told chronologically but is instead woven into the larger stories mentioned above. He shares his travels to some of the fossil hotspots and exciting finds around the world, often alongside his colleagues and friends. He writes of traveling to China to help a friend and colleague identify bones, he discusses his time in Portugal hunting for the earliest dinosaurs, visits to Scotland looking for early sauropods, and dinosaur track hunting in Poland.

The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs are equal parts educational, and entertaining, and even includes a bit of travelogue. Anyone who is a fan of dinosaurs, natural history, or science, in general, will likely enjoy this book. It is written in an accessible and enjoyable way, and Brusatte has a gift for description that makes one feel as if they are there alongside these fascinating creatures.