author : Steve Brusatte

Steve Brusatte, one of the world's leading palaeontologists, uses fossil clues that have been gathered using state-of-the-art technology to follow these magnificent creatures from the start of their evolution, to their final days, and the legacy that they left behind. Along the way, Brusatte offers thrilling accounts of some of the remarkable discoveries he has made, including primitive, human-sized tyrannosaure and monstrous carnivores even larger than a T. rex.

The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs is a timely reminder of what humans can learn from the magnificent creatures who ruled the earth before us.

Over these immense stretches of geological time, mammals developed their trademark features: hair, keen senses of smell and hearing, big brains and sharp intelligence, fast growth and warm-blooded metabolism, a distinctive line-up of teeth, mammary glands that mothers use to nourish their babies with milk – qualities that have underlain their success story.

Out of this long and rich evolutionary history came the mammals of today, including our own species and our closest cousins. But today’s 6,000 mammal species – the egg-laying monotremes including the platypus, marsupials such as kangaroos and koalas that raise their tiny babies in pouches, and placentals like us, who give birth to well-developed young – are simply the few survivors of a once-verdant family tree, which has been pruned both by time and mass extinctions.

Palaeontologist Steve Brusatte weaves together the history and evolution of our mammal forebears with stories of the scientists whose fieldwork and discoveries underlie our knowledge, both of iconic mammals like the mammoths and sabre-toothed tigers of which we have all heard, and of fascinating species that few of us are aware of.

For what we see today is but a very limited range of the mammals that have existed; in this fascinating and groundbreaking book, Steve Brusatte tells their – and our – story.