Paleozoology in The Books Store

Among the major events in evolutionary history, few rival in importance the appearance of animals. The Rise of Animals -- a significant reference providing a comprehensive synthesis of the early radiation of the animal kingdom -- fully captures this moment in geologic time.

Five of the world's leading paleontologists take us on a journey to the most important fossil sites that serve as unique windows to the earliest animal life -- including the Ediacara Hills of Australia, the Russian taiga and tundra, the deserts of southwest Africa, and the rugged coasts of Newfoundland. Each of these places holds a rich fossil record that reveals how the animal form came into existence and why some groups succeeded while others failed. The authors describe the diversification of the Kingdom Animalia into the familiar body plans of today: from simple animals such as sponges to complex groups like mollusks, arthropods, echinoderms, and chordates that appear explosively in the Cambrian.

This exquisitely illustrated book reveals the early moments of an evolutionary process that eventually resulted in our own species. An essential resource for paleontologists, biologists, geologists, and teachers, The Rise of Animals is the best single reference on one of earth's most significant events.

They would have had huge heads with very large, saberlike teeth, large lizard eyes, no visible ears, and perhaps a mixture of reptilian scales and tufts of mammalian hair.... The Gorgons ruled a world of animals that were but one short evolutionary step away from being mammals.

If you're a bird watcher, you get a field guide to the birds. Now dinosaur watchers can get their own field guide, a just-bigger-than-pocket-size encyclopedia of dinosaur science. The text is clear, objective, up-to-date, and dense with information, containing sections on every aspect of dinosaur discovery and biology.

The heart of Dinosaurs is the guide. Each page in this section has an artist's portrait of an interesting dinosaur, tells how its name is pronounced and what it means, tells where and when it lived, and describes the animal's discovery and lifestyle. Most helpfully, it also lists museums where the fossils can be seen, and it does not confine itself to North America: London, Paris, Cape Town, Beijing, Melbourne, and Ulan Bator get noticed, too.

Finding the answer to the first occupies much of Chiappe and Dingus's account, as they compare their evidence against similar finds in Spain and the Gobi. Determining the second affords the authors a chance to discuss newly developed dating techniques, including DNA analysis--which caused overly enthusiastic reporters to announce that the authors were on the brink of cloning sauropods from long-dead embryos. ("We do not know nearly enough about how DNA works," the authors write, to pull off such a feat.) Finally, their reconstruction of the ancient environment of Patagonia offers clues for how the unlucky eggs had come to be buried in prehistoric mud.