Автор книги пытается изложить понятным языком достижения современной палеонтологии — науки, изучающей историю жизни на Земле. Нынешняя палеонтология требует прочных знаний законов физики и химии, умения считать (и не только на пальцах), глубокого понимания методов статистики, не говоря уже о разделах современной биологии. Эта наука смело вмешивается в дела планетарной физики и движения материков, загоняет в тупик своими открытиями биологов. Она способна не только рассказать о том, как выглядела Земля в отдаленном прошлом, но и о том, что произойдет с нашей планетой в будущем. Под одной обложкой собраны наиболее интересные сведения о тех, кто населял нашу планету в течение почти четырех миллиардов лет

The way in which living reptiles are related to prehistoric reptiles is constantly being revised, as more and earlier fossils are unearthed and dating becomes more sophisticated. The earliest reptiles, descendents of ancient amphibian-like creatures, appeared about 300 million years ago (mya). These ancestral reptiles were able to invade land by developing a waterproof skin and laying shelled eggs in which their young could develop on land. Together with the dinosaurs and the pterosaurs (the first flying reptiles, often known as pterodactyls), crocodilians (modern crocodiles and alligators) and birds have evolved from an ancestral group known as the Archosauria or Ruling Reptiles. <...>

Пермский период — время господства терапсид, в том числе звероящеров, которые являются предками млекопитающих, а значит и нас с вами! Это единственный геологический период, выделенный в России, в Пермской губернии. Хотя динозавры в нашей стране популярны, их в России найдено мало, а вот про пермскую жизнь мало кто знает подробно, хотя пермских местонахождений у нас много. Некоторые пермские терапсиды найдены только у нас.

Земля возникла около 4,6 млрд.лет назад, а первые признаки жизни на нашей планете появились по меньшей мере 3,5 миллиарда лет назад. Эта книга повествует об одной из самых удивительных и волнующих эпох в истории жизни на Земле – о возникновении первых сухопутных животных – рептилий и о самых потрясающих представителях этого класса живых существ – динозаврах. Большинство животных, с которыми вы познакомитесь в книге, вымерли за миллионы лет до того, как появились первые люди. И все же динозавры – одни из самых восхитительных на свете созданий <...>

IN 1842, British comparative anatomist Richard Owen (1804–1892) coined the word dinosaur. Owen constructed this word from the Greek words deinos, meaning “terrible” (though Owen considered it to mean “fearfully great”), and sauros, meaning “lizard” or “reptile.” To Owen, the “fearfully great lizards” were large, extinct reptiles known from only a handful of fossils discovered in western Europe since the 1820s. Today, dinosaur fossils are known from all continents and represent hundreds of distinct types of dinosaurs.
In this chapter, I briefly answer some basic questions about dinosaurs and introduce some topics discussed at greater length in this book.

If I were, at about age twenty as a budding paleozoologist and paleoartist, handed a copy of this book by a mysterious time traveler, I would have been shocked as well as delighted. The pages would reveal a world of new dinosaurs and ideas that I barely had a hint of or had no idea existed at all. My head would spin at the revelation of the therizinosaurs such as the wacky feathered Beipiaosaurus and at the biplane flying dromaeosaurids, not to mention the little halszkaraptors with their duck-like beaks, or the oversized shoulder spines of Gigantspinosaurus, the neck spines of Amargasaurus, the brow horns and atrophied arms of bulldog-faced Carnotaurus,

T. rex crashes through the trees and leaps on a juvenile Triceratops. The huge predator has scaly skin and tufts of colorful feathers over its eyes; it crunches through the bones of the terrified herbivore with a force of several tons . . .
We are familiar with this kind of scene from the movies, but how much of it is guesswork? When we look at dinosaur behavior, we’re examining every aspect of how these remarkable beasts lived. Do we need a time machine to be sure what they looked like and how they behaved? The answer is, not necessarily. We have fossils, and we have smart ways to compare those fossils to modern animals. <...>

The past of Australia is the most mysterious of the history of all the continents. Much of its landscape is the oldest in the world. Its heartland seemed almost uninhabitable to the Europeans who came during the last two centuries, and yet it was inhabited—by Aborigines who had come thousands of years before and by a fauna unlike any other in the world. Where the Aborigines came from and when they came is still a subject of debate: the last twenty million years of the history of the marsupial fauna has been intensely studied and is now well understood—a mere tick of the clock in the history of this continent. <...>