Fossil. The mere word kicks most people’s imagination into high gear. It mostly evokes dinosaurs, of course—the stars of the Mesozoic era. And yet, because those famous reptiles are already the focus of many other books, in this book we will discuss different but no less fascinating kinds of animals: the ones that many people refer to incorrectly as “marine dinosaurs.

Книга геолога и писателя А. И. Шалимова «Охотники эа динозаврами» — сборник науч-но-художественных рассказов и повестей, затрагивающих многие не решенные наукой проблемы геологии, энергетики земных недр, кибернетики.
Книга представляет большой интерес для [широкого круга читателей, особенно — молодежи.

Динозавры. Само это слово действует на нас завораживающе. Мы сразу представляем себе этих доисторических животных. Необыкновенные гигантские чудовища поражают наше воображение. Сенсационные, зачастую довольно сомнительные публикации в прессе, динозавры в разных видах на красочных иллюстрациях, открытках и даже этикетках, нашумевшие выставки с двигающимися и рычащими динозаврами, начиненными электроникой, -все это приблизило к нам этих животных, сделало наши представления о них ярче и многообразнее.

Эта книга о том, что говорят палеонтологам находки окаменелых гнёзд, скорлупы и яиц динозавров и как учёные получают информацию о биологии размножения давно вымерших животных. Одновременно это путешествие в места захоронения гнёзд с яйцами и детёнышами, а также познавательный экскурс в область науки о размножении рептилий и птиц. Одна из главных проблем всех яйцекладущих животных заключается в том, что детёныш развивается внутри яйца вне организма матери. Яйцо- это дом для эмбриона, и вероятность, что зародыш станет птенцом и вылупится из яйца, зависит от того, как устроен этот дом и как он защищён от агрессивной внешней среды. В общем, эта книга не только о собственно находках, но и обо всём том, что помогает нам понять и правильно истолковать находки отложенных многие десятки миллионов лет назад яиц, из которых давно вылупились детёныши давно не существующих, когда-то царствовавших на планете рептилий, оставивших на Земле своих не менее удивительных потомков, называемых птицами.

Автор книги Констатин Евгеньевич Михайлов - кандидат биологических наук, сотрудник Палеонтологического института им. А.А. Борисяка РАН, много лет посвятивший исследованиям древних гнёзд, окаменелых яиц и скорлупы, участник многих экспедиций в Монгольскую Гоби.

Для широкого круга читателей.

Jurassic Park was not the first science fiction to influence science, of course. To name but a few early influences: The submarine was invented in the imagination of Jules Verne’s 1870 book Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. The atomic bomb was conjured up by H. G. Wells in his 1914 novel The World Set Free. And NASA stole the 10-9-8-7-6 idea of the rocket countdown from Fritz Lang’s 1929 sci-fi film Frau im Mond (Woman in the Moon). Over the years there have been many, many more.
But here’s the unique thing about the science fiction of Jurassic Park: It influenced the way in which science looks at the past, rather than the future. The evolution of the field of dinosaur science, how it has blossomed by bounds and branched out in recent years, has been thanks in no small part to Steven Spielberg’s iconic movie.<...>

I’ve already written several books about fossils and paleontology, including a college textbook in paleontology for upper-level undergraduates (Bringing Fossils to Life, 2nd ed., 2013, Columbia University Press) and a popular book about fossil collecting (Fantastic Fossils, 2020, Columbia University Press), but I’ve never found a book that gives a good general introduction to vertebrate history for the general reader and fossil enthusiast with high-quality color illustrations, so this book is intended to fll that need.

Since the publication of my book Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters (Columbia University Press, 2007; second edition, 2017), the fields of evolutionary biology and paleontology have made many new discoveries. Meanwhile, the evidence for evolution has been piling up and accumulating since publication in 1859 of the revolutionary book, On the Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin. Some of that evidence is discussed in my first evolution book, but much of it is new, or mentioned only briefly in that book. <...>

The New Yorker has commissioned many famous covers, but the most famous of all was the one that appeared on the March 29, 1976 issue. View of the World from yth Avenue is a charming work of ink, pencil, and watercolor by the artist Saul Steinberg. It is best viewed from bottom to top. At the bottom is Ninth Avenue, where you can easily make out the cars, streetlights, pedestrians, and a red and yellow sign in front of a lot that reads park. Your eye moves up a cross street to Tenth Avenue, and from there to the Hudson River, traversing the middle of the cover with an Amazonian majesty. Beyond the river is a grimy streak simply labeled Jersey. Beyond Jersey lies a non-descript block of green with three scattered mountains shaped like lumps of clay, along with a handful of names, like Kansas City, Chicago, and Utah. On the other side of the United States, the Pacific Ocean looks about the same size as the Hudson. <...>

Thomas Henry Huxley proclaimed the Origin of Species to be “the most potent instrument for the extension of the realm of knowledge which has come into man’s hands since Newton’s Principia.” Ernst Mayr, arguably the greatest evolutionary theorist since Darwin, asserted that the Origin of Species triggered the greatest paradigm shift in the history of science. The late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, who inherited Huxley’s mantle as public intellectual, called the theory of evolution one of the half dozen most important ideas in the entire history of Western thought. The philosopher of science Daniel Dennett called evolution the most dangerous idea in the history of science.<...>

On a recent afternoon spent in London’s Natural History Museum (NHM), I noticed that a life-size animatronic Velociraptor had finally sprouted feathers. They might have been a touch sparse compared to the plumage of counterparts in museums elsewhere, but it was encouraging to see them there. A few years earlier, the Tyrannosaurs: Meet the Family exhibition at the Australian Museum in Sydney had featured not only wonderful feathered fossils from China, but also models of shaggy carnivores that could have been swiped from Jim Henson’s workshop yet were still creepy enough to strike fear into the hearts of gobsmacked kids. <...>